Angelos Papadimitriou
Castrato - Review
October 10, 2010–October 30, 2010Artforum
We are pleased to share the review of Angelos Papadimitriou exhibition “Castrato” at The Breeder, on the October issue of Artforum, written by Christopher Marinos.
Angelos Papadimitriou
THE BREEDER
Iasonos 45
September 22–November 13, 2010
Angelos Papadimitriou’s latest show at this gallery is a tribute to manhood, creativity, and self-mutilation. In “Castrato,” the eccentric actor, singer, and sculptor ridicules the perversions of an oppressive society, lamenting bygone innocence and celebrating transgressive imagination.
The exhibition, divided into two parts, explores mythological traditions and the way repression relates to the kitsch tendencies of the Greek petit bourgeois. On the ground floor, artist and veterinarian Zisis Papazahariou presents a series of sculptures consisting of plastic toy soldiers and animal testicles preserved in vials of various sizes. (Papadimitriou, enthusiastic about Papazahariou’s work and its intersections with his own, invited the artist to join him in the exhibition.) Papadimitriou’s own work occupies the basement, where he has assembled a collection of his sculptures made over the past twenty years. His faience ceramics, porcelains, and papier-mâché objects have a preternatural physicality: Inspired by Greek votives, they feature chthonic deities prominent in myths of castration, blind folly, and punishment, including Attis, consort of Mother Cybele, and Ate, the eldest daughter of Zeus. Elsewhere, in works such as The Difficult Adolescence, 2008, the artist uses heirlooms—in this case an altered cabinet—to exhibit biographical details of his life.
Papadimitriou is here willing to sacrifice the allure of a new body of work for the sake of social commentary. In foregrounding castration, he offers an occasion on which to question the transcendental signifiers that define Greek (and others’) wishes, signifiers that structure our problematic subjectivity.
— Christopher Marinos
