Works by Vanessa Anastasopoulou
Edited by Eleni Saroglou
Designed by Studio Christos Lialios
Photographed by Christoforos Doulgeris
Translation by Alkistis Kontou Dima

240 x 150 mm
8 images 220 x 145 mm / 32 pages (8 unbound folded sheets) / silk screen printed soft cover / 500 copies /english edition
(2014)
Price: 5 €

All Books

Vanessa Anastasopoulou
A Glass Menagerie

     

Glass Menagerie

‘By poetic association they came to represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past. They stood for all the small and tender things that relieve the austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the sensitive. The areaway where the cats were torn to pieces was one thing―my sister’s white curtains and tiny menagerie of glass were another. Somewhere be-tween them was the world that we lived in.’

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, 1945

Works that are on the verge of two worlds in action. Against the all-embracing vulgarity, we become magicians, hoping to approach reality from a different angle. We find refuge in alchemies; we create an imaginary world by changing and transforming the familiar. This series of works were made using pencils, watercolors and threads, on handmade paper. They were created with attention to detail, which mirrors our fragile and uncertain existence posing questions about our passage through space and time.

Once an image is conceived and registered, we try, over and over again, with japanese-like persistence, to decode it. It may then be that we have touched upon something. Thoughts, one may call them feather-like, are born from random notes and slowly, gradually, they turn into a statement. Our world is made of fleeting images. Some deal with the handling of loss, the removal of its load. Others, magical, marvelous ones to be kept close at hand for a journey that is frequently rough, its destination unknown. Suitcases. Our luggage, as an archetypal carrier, is loaded with their history, with our history.

A Glass Menagerie was published by Cube Art Editions on the occasion of her exhibition at Zoumboulakis Gallery, 2014.

Vanessa Anastasopoulou born in Athens (1972), studied at Wimbledon School of Art (BA. Hons, 1992-1995) and at Royal College of Art (MA. Painting). This is her fifth solo exhibition since 1997. She has also participated in many group shows throughout Greece and abroad. Many of her works belong to international collections (Deutsche Bank, British Airways, Aylesford Newsprint).