Kalfayan Galleries are pleased to present the solo exhibition of Maro Michalakakos which opens on Wednesday, 22 September 2021, 18.00 – 21.00.

Maro Michalakakos presents a new body of work (sculptural installation, watercolors), an immersive environment that engulfs visitors and asks for a simultaneous departure and return to levels of experience beyond and beneath speech, to a place where space, time and bodies stretch and bend as much as our imagination allow them. The exhibition maps a journey that challenges our earthbound existence, it articulates worlds colliding internally or far away, it follows species fusing as they form future networks, it launches a mission of fantasy across corporeal and disembodied universes.

A mission is being prepared. A journey to the future with fragments from the past. A sentient network of life is being formed, a new form of existence that navigates the trajectory of the cargo ship. Michalakakos invites us on a course around our cosmos, to collide with stardust and planetary rings, to travel the universe by spinning around the foundations of the self. In anticipation of a future without our planet, Michalakakos delves on the ground to reach for the stars, so that space, as a place of deep ecology, can be explored without leaving the Earth. Yet.

Maro Michalakakos was born in Athens in 1967. She studied painting in France (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Plastiques de Cergy-Pontoise, 1987-1993) and Germany (Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, Braunschweig, 1988- 1989). In 2006 she was shortlisted for the Painting Award of Castelon County in Valencia, Spain. She has presented her work in numerous exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Recent shows include: ‘Mr. Robinson Crusoe stayed home. Adventures of design in time of crisis’, Benaki Museum, Athens (2021); La chasse’ (with Béatrice Plumet), Embassy of France, Athens, Greece; ‘Weaving the future II’, Katsigra Museum, Larissa, Greece. Artwork commission in 2021 by Hermès for the Athens store. Her works are part of private and public collections, such as the Fonds Nationales d’Art Contemporain in France, Istanbul Modern and others. She has also created set-installations for the theatre, in collaboration with directors, theatre companies and festivals, including the National Theatre of Greece, the Athens and Epidaurus Festival and Onassis Stegi among others.

Enigmatic and multifaceted, the work of Maro Michalakakos is imbued with the softness and ambiguity of dreams. In her sculptural installations, painting, drawings and reliefs on velvet, the artist includes social and cultural references, and often draws from personal and family memories. In some of her works she introduces birds and the natural kingdom, often as a way to touch upon universal themes such as power, oppression, authority and the interconnected concepts of life and death.