2011 – “Maria Fragoudaki”, Skoufa Gallery, Athens, Greece
Review
In 1910, Wassily Kandinsky completed his book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” and painted the first abstract watercolour, opening a new chapter in the history of art, that of abstraction. The innovation of abstraction liberated art from its descriptive elements.
The young artist, Maria Fragoudaki, balancing between abstract and expressionistic art, presents in her first solo exhibition 35 paintings created since 2007.
Liberated from the need of pictorial representation and maintaining the ability to experiment, explore, and express, with still apparent influences from Jackson Pollock, her paintings are instinctive rather than cerebral. Fragoudaki’s paintings manifest her explorations in the vocabulary of colour and composition, thus expressing the dynamics of her materials.
The artist’s work is divided in four colour groups: red, blue, green, yellow. Red has a particular symbolic connotation as it has been her first choice in the dialogue she tries to establish with the viewer. Representing a range of feelings she experiences, red absorbs her and sets her free, giving a distinctive dynamic in her paintings.
All her paintings are composed through multiple dense, textured layers of colour which is characteristic of her expression mode, creating a personal style that is both fresh and highly promising.
Olinka Miliaresi-Varvitsioti
Art Historian