Athanasios Argianas

Active also as an experimental musician under the pseudonym Gavouna, Argianas demonstrates the versatility of a practice combining several media and formats. His sculptures, installations and paintings are based on musical pieces that he’s written. For his recent participation in Pale Carnage at Arnolfini, he realised sculptures which visualise whistling quartets whose ethereal and formalist character mimic proto-Modernist synthesizers like the 1930s Theremin. This was one of the first electronic musical instruments which, much in the spirit of its time, carry a wealth of utopian ideas about the future of music. Argianas’ installations originate from invented Folk songs that make use of ancient cyclical canons. His music is visually translated into simple constructions informed by a sense of directional movement. These formal models attempt to humanise Modernist cultural tropes – namely the abstract Constructivism of Naum Gabo and Moholy-Nahy, avant-garde literature and the esoteric understanding of technology of the time - through the mediation of Folk Art’s endlessly repeated forms. Sculptural works like Il pleut (2007) are inspired by Apollinaire’s homonymous poem written in 1918 where words were typed like raindrops. His series of Lyrical Machines (2005-) are proposal for poems read by three voices that alternate clockwise between reading lines from the centre outwards. Argianas’ works (or elements of) reference each other formally and in their content, thus becoming part of a generative system, as it can be seen in his ongoing series of Braid Paintings (2006-), gouaches arranged in specific patterns that depict cyclical, looped braid designs based on found imagery. Other works include musical installations conceived as an assemblage of sound pieces – whistling quartets or canons audible on transparent Perspex records put on turntables - and a series of models sitting on platforms which are transformed into almost electric sounds by the acoustic distortions caused by the transcription to the records.

Argianas (b. 1976, Athens, GR) lives and works in London. Since graduating from the MA Fine Arts at London’s Goldsmiths College, he has had solo exhibitions at Max Wigram Gallery (2007); The Breeder, Athens (2007); Alessandro De March, Milan (2008); and Cell Project Space (with Nick Laessing) in London. Recent group exhibitions include Present Tense at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2007); Pale Carnage (2007), Arnolfini, Bristol (touring to Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee); Personne ne veut mourir (2006), Arquebuse (Geneva); Artsessions (2006), Kunsthalle Wien Project Space (Vienna); Bloomberg New Contemporaries (under the auspices of the 2006 Liverpool Biennial), Club Row, Liverpool and Rochelle School, London; Dialogue II (2006), Enrico Fornello Gallery (Prato) and the 2003 Prague Biennale, National Gallery (Prague).

For further information contact the gallery