Galería Luis Adelantado is pleased to present the first solo show by Eleni Gkinosati in Spain. In her painting practice the artist casts a critical gaze over current modes of representation, endeavouring to re-activate the distinctive driving force behind some of the art movements that have punctuated the history of art. More specifically, those that have explored the signature gesturality of the abstract expressionism that came into being in the USA in the early-1940s, engaging with the methods of Action Painting.
This knowing nod to the past seeks to distance her work from the digital iconography that, to some extent, dominates today’s art; in doing so she questions happening contemporary practices which the artist believes to be suffering from a kind of “historical amnesia”
Her work is a categorical statement of her own presence, of the trace of her body in action, expressed in the large format of the canvases she uses. This allows her to place herself within the painting itself in order to cathartically render a form of aggressiveness and an unsettling character that is ultimately balanced with the very confines of the surface itself.
Gkinosati also sets her sights on movements further back in the past, focusing on the historical avant-gardes and the legacy of Surrealism, the idea of surrendering to the automatic act of painting, spontaneously following an inner drive through a dynamic bodily action that reveals symbols but, above all else, emotions.
For the artist, the action of painting affords a mystagogic focus that furnishes answers and throws light onto what is not visible to the human eye. Like a dialogue between what does not yet exist and what is in the process of coming into being. Each one of her works has a completely unique identity, a step towards the “other”, a demonstration of the artist’s ongoing quest. A constant predisposition towards self-determination.