Nikomachi Karakostanoglou
Nikomachi Karakostanoglou is a painter and sculptor. The main object of her research is materiality and the narratives or stories it entails and constructs. Her work utilizes the morphological and semantic capacities of a wide range of aesthetic categories—in situ installations, sculptures, watercolors, and videos—proposing a spatial and experiential condition around themes such as the relationship of human beings with nature, the reuse of things and their lives in the present, folk history, gender politics, mysticism and magic, spirituality, and sensuality.
She perceives material (bronze, marble, clay, paper, and color) as an indispensable element of each work’s form, idea, and self-actualization. For her, materials are conduits of communication but also empathy, and her works suggest an ongoing dialogue between tangible surface and "immaterial" (psychological, emotional, mnemonic, and cosmological) energy. Therefore, she remains constantly in active interaction with the viewers and the historical or social contexts of the places, buildings, and monuments in which the works are exhibited. Her artistic practice is a kind of enlivenment of visual memory, capturing what "otherwise would slip away, but of enlivening what otherwise would remain dead" (Erwin Panofsky).
Nikomachi Karakostanoglou was born and raised in Athens. She studied business administration at the Athens University of Economics and Business. She continued her studies in London, attending the Public Art (BA) program at Chelsea School of Art and the Fine Art: Sculpture (BA, Hons) program at Wimbledon School of Art. In 2011, she left for Shanghai to study Chinese calligraphy, through which she explored new forms of rendering water and transparency. After her return from Shanghai in 2017, she worked exclusively on her drawings and sculptures, challenging herself with the scale of the works and the materials she had collected during her travels in Asia. In 2019, she attended an art residency in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Her work has been presented at the Benaki Museum as well as in galleries in Greece and abroad.
