Nefs Amari. Elli - Maria Komninou Nenedaki
People and landscapes from the 1970s and 1980s
Album presentation: Monday 19 September 2011, 19:00 – 20:00
Exhibition opening: Monday, 19 September 2011, 20:00 – 22:00
On Monday, 19 September the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete opened the exhibition Nefs Amari of Elli-Maria Komninou Nenedaki and the Annual exhibition of the Art Workshops of the Museum"s Education Department.
Nefs Amari
Elli-Maria Komninou Nenedaki
People and landscapes from the 1970s and 1980s
The painter Elli-Maria Komninou Nenedaki engaged in dialogue with the nature and the people of Amari, the ancestral village of her husband. This dialogue served as an inspiration which led to an exquisite collection of approximately 65 drawings with scenes from the everyday life in the community of Amari.
Kindly donated by the artist and now part of the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, the collection of Elli Komninou is exhibited for the first time.
Maria Marangou, art critic and Art Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, notes: "Elli Komninou is a painter of our time without the obsessions bequeathed to our artists by the end of the twentieth century. She takes up pencil, colour and all her media and materials to produce art without the conceit of introducing new, unprecedented things; without that instability that often haunts art as a fad. Among the myriads of things in her trunks, a series of drawings stand as the portrait of a community at a time before the boisterous advent of consumerist television shows, when people still had their individual identities. This is the community of Amari in the 1970s, a time when, as the painter informs us, her daily contact with the villagers, their "good mornings" and "good evenings", were accompanied by sketches which capture life between the remaining Byzantine houses and a horizon that extends from the top of Mount Psiloritis to the pointed rocks of Triopetra, in the sea that links the island to the mythical Orient.
The collection of Elli Komninou from those Augusts at Amari reaches our present time live and vibrant, depicting individuals who may be no longer around and landscapes which have suffered the effects of "civilisation". These works convey the preciousness of nostalgia and the history of everyday people and places under a strong light or at dusk..."
Elli-Maria Komninou Nenedaki was born in 1937, studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Yannis Moralis and continued with printmaking at the Kongl Konstacademien in Sweden and mural painting at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.
She has received several awards and distinctions and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. In 1987 she became Assistant Professor of the Athens Technological Education Institute.
The Social Group of Amari Women and the "Samitos" Cultural Society of Amari-Opsigia have published a catalogue-album as a tribute to the artist"s creations.
The opening of the exhibition will be combined with the presentation of the album "Nefs Amari. Drawings and texts by Elli-Maria Komninou Nenedaki. Excerpts from the book will be read by the actor and director Thomas Katifes.
The exhibition will be open until the end of October, 2011.
