Andreas Lolis Catalogue

This catalogue, featuring artworks from his series “21st Century Relics” was printed in 500 copies in April 2016.

Texts: Ralph Rugoff, Dionysia Stephanopoulou

Designed by Michalis Paparounis, futura publications

THE BREEDER

47 pages, colored paper, hard cover

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With time being a commodity in the current society of mass consumption, Andreas Lolis gracefully sculpts moments of attention-seeking stillness. His marble sculptures stand in complete contrast to the ephemeral and aversive qualities of the objects they represent, such as cardboard boxes, garbage bags or styrofoam pieces. Rather than mimicking idealized beauty, the artist mimics trivial and disposable objects, subverting and redirecting our attention towards the unnoticed. The painstakingly beautifully crafted objects are hard to read. Even upon realizing their materiality, one is compelled to constantly re examine them, as if unable to grasp such an object stripped of its material and social connotations.

In doing so, the artist manages to revisit what normally holds the least bit of our attention. The banality of these, otherwise barely visible objects, morphs into an elegy for our society, namely our consumerist habits, our misplaced attention and our disassociated perception. The artist’s austere criticism of the capitalist and consumerist society in crisis, is alleviated by the underlying comforting prospect of reinvention and possibility. The sculptures require the audience’s active gaze for their multitude of meanings to unravel, while providing space for them to be present within these constant contradictions. As with the reinvention of the art object’s connotations, as opposed to those of the object in and of itself, one might also infer potentially reinvented subjectivities.