Andreas Lolis
Prosaic Origins - NEON City Project 2018

September 12, 2018–November 14, 2018
British School at Athens

ANDREAS LOLIS
PROSAIC ORIGINS

NEON City Project 2018 | New commission
British School at Athens
Souidias 52 Athens

Curator | Nayia Yiakoumaki, Curator & Head of Curatorial studies at Whitechapel Gallery

Andreas Lolis is a sculptor who works with marble, one of the noblest materials in the history of art. Cardboard boxes, ladders and planks of wood become marble effigies of precarious, transitory and unnoticed original objects. Through this traditional method, he elevates the everyday world of abandoned partial objects, makeshift constructions and ordinary things to the status of statues.

The British School at Athens opens its garden to the general public. Established in 1886, as part of a wider political and cultural movement that used as its foundation the model of ‘foreign’ educational institutions originating in developed western countries, the BSA offered a base in Greece for people to study all aspects of Hellenic culture, ancient, medieval and modern.

For this historic setting, Lolis has created sculptures that collide with the western idealisation of Classical Greek heritage installed in such a way as if they had always been there, abandoned objects, disrupting previously bucolic appreciations of the urban garden and the harmonious equilibrium of the School’s classical architecture.

CITY PROJECT is an initiative for public art and the city, conceived and commissioned annually by NEON to a Greek artist. NEON aims to activate public and historical places through contemporary art, contributing to the interaction of art, society and the city.