George Hadjimichalis at the National Museum of Contemporary Art - Athens - Brief Article

This recent mid-career survey of Greek-born artist George Hadjimichalis filled the first floor of the newly opened National Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Athens. On view were large-scale paintings, sculptures, photo works and installations spanning the past 15 years. The 47-year-old artist, who has shown frequently in Europe, uses a vocabulary of international modernism and conceptualism, yet his fascination with archeology and mythological themes, plus a certain historicist approach, are among the unmistakably Greek attributes of the work.

After studying painting and photography in Athens and London in the early 1970s, Hadjimichalis traveled extensively in Europe and South America. Inspired by a visit to Documenta V in Kassel in 1973, he experimented with film and with text pieces in collaboration with writer Kyrillos Sarris. The earliest works in the exhibition hint at the influence of the Transavanguardia movement. Officinae Pictorium/circa 1221 (1985-87), for example, is an installation of acrylic-on-wood panels arranged as a narrow enclosure approximately 35 by 8 by 7 feet; painted sides face inward. Openings at either end allow passage into a corridor-like space where brilliant fields of deep blue and wispy clouds of gray and white envelop the viewer like the murals in an ancient tomb. Attached to the middle of one panel, a tall narrow photo of two dark, ghostly figures is covered in glass, as if to protect a fragile icon. At one end of the enclosure, two delicately rendered life-size male figures resemble fragments of a fresco. The semi-nude figures, each bent at the waist, are borrowed from Baptism scenes: one from a 15th-century Piero della Francesca painting and the other from an 11th-century Byzantine illuminated manuscript. The images also recall some of the figures painted in the mid-1980s by Clemente or Paladino. In Hadjimichalis's moody installation, however, the figures are subordinate to the rather abstract, sensory thrust of the work.

The artist suggests a more sinister and claustrophobic space in Crate (1996). Here, a large, whitewashed wooden booth, about 7 feet high, has on one side a door bearing a mirrorlike window painted black on the inside. The opposite side of the crate is open, revealing an empty interior painted gloss red and garishly lit by a bare lightbulb dangling from the top of the crate. Suggestive of a prison cell, the work also hints at a harrowing, existentialist void. Less intimidating but similarly haunting is the series of works titled "Archives." Small Archive of Images (1986/1996) consists of a long wooden cabinet fitted with 100 small drawers, each containing a found object or art work; the piece was assembled over a decade. Since each item harbors a personal significance for the artist, the work as a whole may be seen as a mnemonic device or a kind of autobiographical time capsule. A work in progress, Workshop of Projects and Images in Crisis features a large wooden hut made of planks taken from an early 20th-century Greek house. Affixed to the walls inside the shabby structure are 277 small drawings and paintings, abstract images derived from details of works by artists ranging from Giotto and van Eyck to El Greco and Cezanne. With this piece and many others in the show, Hadjimichalis presents his art as part of an historical continuity that is forever vital and changing.

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