The Breeder
Jannis Varelas - Liste Art Fair Basel 2016
June 13, 2016–June 19, 2016Basel, Switzerland
The Breeder presents “COUPLE OF STEPS TOWARDS SOCIALISM” a solo booth by Jannis Varelas at LISTE 2016 with performances scheduled for Monday June 13 and Thursday June 16 2016.
Jannis Varelas paintings are building up presence around absent minds. He is making use of an iconography that plays with the raw and unsophisticated as means of undermining the concept of what art should look like. The childlike endeavors directly oppose neoliberal ideology and prescripts that concentrate around competitiveness, efficiency and productivity.
Jannis Varelas’ performance “Couple of Steps Towards Socialism” includes characters you would expect to find in a children’s book or television show like a rabbit or a banana. The cast perpetually works on an intricate production line coordinated towards a very important output, which is never realized nor revealed. Within this interplay of intense production without profit, the artist is less interested in creating a performance with a clear narrative structure, than yielding a dialogue between the conventional reality, embedded in the repetitiveness of industrial production, as well within the artistic procedure of production itself, and the values of contemporary capitalist culture.
Jannis Varelas (b. 1977 Greek) lives and works between Athens, Los Angeles
and Vienna and is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London (MFA) and the Athens School of Fine Arts (BA).
Works by Jannis Varelas are in the Saatchi Collection, London; the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens; the Zabludowicz Collection, London; the Hort Family Collection, NY.
Selected solo shows include: “New Flags for a New Country”, The Breeder, Athens (2015); “Sleep My Little Sheep Sleep”, Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati, Ohio, curated by Xenia Kalpaktsoglou (2012); “The Oblong Box”, Kunsthalle Athena, Athens (2011) curated by Marina Fokidis.
Selected group shows include: “Fireflies in the Night Take Wing”, curated by Robert Storr, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens (2016); “Ametria”, curated by Roberto Cuoghi, DESTE Foundation and Benaki Museum, Athens (2015); “Paper – works from the Saatchi Collection”, Saatchi Gallery, London (2013); “Hell As Pavillion”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, curated by Nadja Argyropoulou (2013); “Skin Fruit: Selections from The Dakis Joannou Collection”, curated by Jeff Koons, New Museum, New York (2010); “Lebt und arbeitet in Wien III: Stars in a Plastic Bag”, Kunsthalle Wien, curated by Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Raphaela Platow, Olga Sviblova and Angela Stief (2010); New Orleans Biennial Prospect 1, curated by Dan Cameron, New Orleans (2008); “Destroy Athens”, 1st Athens Biennial, curated by Xenia Kalpaktzoglou, Poka Yio and Augustine Zenakos, Athens (2007).
