NOTHING BUT SPACE

Alexander Hassenpflug / Michail Pirgelis

Curated by Apostolos Palavrakis

Donopoulos International Fine Arts Gallery presents the exhibition Nothing But Space displaying works by Alexander Hassenpflug and Michail Pirgelis from 10 April until 10 May at the cultural compound of Mylos. Suggestions of both artists based on the recasting of the form are recorded. Through different techniques each one attempts to produce visual ensembles emphasizing to the dipole of manual process and technological involvement and issues of content detected in the field of image overvaluation, stimuli, information, as well as their contributors. Alexander Hassenpflug attempts to conquer the formalistic structure by exploiting the potentials of painting, illustration and printing methods. He experiments with analogue applications and the latest trends thus examining the margins of their coexistence and acrobats between traditional processing and digital intervention. His collages reflect a multi-leveled range of communication, within which verbal changes, inspiring abuse of advertising aesthetics, but also the cathartic interposed clippings make up a modified version of a world dependent on the holders of information. Having graduated from London’s Central St Martins in 2005, the artist from Hamburg has already made an impact in the European art community. He participated in a series of exhibitions and projects in the British capital and also took part in the Vienna Biennials. He currently lives and works in Berlin. Born in Essen, Germany, and raised in Xanthi, Greece, Michail Pirgelis studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts by the side of Rosemarie Trockel, an emblematic personality of contemporary art. For structuring sculptures and installations he uses secondary materials, parts of withdrawn passenger aircrafts often tracked among them. He cuts and removes according to the logic of borrowing. Through distinctness of hardships, grinding or deformation of surfaces, displacement and resumption arise autonomous units indicative of their temporary status and loss of their original, seemingly ideal operating destination. What is omitted is experienced as absence, the invisible becomes visible. Fragmented information is divided equally affected by creation and destruction, utopia and pragmatism. As art critic Angelika Stepken points out, the artist «seeks a balance between the body and abstraction, value and worthlessness, the compressed area and scope, memory and transience». Pirgelis’s art loans have been displayed at plenty of exhibitions in Europe, the United States and Japan. Their creator was presented with the award of Villa Romana in Florence in 2007, as well as that of Adolf Loos a year later.