190 x 225 cm
Jarvis Art is pleased to present Konstantina Krikzoni's debut New York solo exhibition, Warriors.
Krikzoni's paintings explore the expressive force and historical resonances of the female body. Working with translucent washes of oil paint combined with finely-drawn figures, the process of painting tells the story of the artist's own bodily relationship to the images she creates.
Krikzoni's paintings begin with drawing on linen, with characters and relationships emerging from exploratory lines. The rehearsals and revisions remain visible throughout the process, developing a sense of vulnerability and movement that recall the pentimenti surrounding Italian renaissance drawings. Colour washes dilute and disrupt these traces, building a sense of place that remains transparent, echoing the artist's origins growing up on the coast of the Aegean Sea.
Her cast of female characters feels both timeless and contemporary. For the last year, Krikzoni has made drawings of the Ancient Greek statues of youths, the male Kouroi and female Korai, in the National Archeological Museum in Athens. Possessing both monolithic containment and unguarded innocence, these sculptures helped the artist create beings that seem both wild and fragile at once. Krikzoni crafts a private kind of ambivalence from her origin culture, one that captures that psychological state of the creative process. In this way, they become a form of self-portraiture.
For this new series of works, her all-female characters group together in a collective endeavor that could be an army or an artistic community. They seem poised between states of awareness, regrouping to reflect and evaluate the challenges before them. The large scale painting La Chimera (2026) plays upon this tension - the composition is imbued with subtle resistance, with figures on horseback and bearing flags. The painting is ultimately concerned with searching for what is lost and possibly unreachable. Resisting narrative resolution, the works in Warriors address emotion not as subject matter but as a condition that shapes the production of the image.
Responding to the dramatic history paintings and battle scenes of Delacroix, Ingres and Uccello, Krikzoni instead infuses her scenes with a feeling of doubt and fragmentation. Set in vaporous spaces with multiple viewpoints, they use subtle tonal ranges with bursts of high color that are evocative of place without ever being specific. The figures themselves are equally suggestive, mixing balletic poise with amazonian vigor, expressing resistance to an unseen threat, as though the enemy they face is a part of themselves. The battle these warriors are engaged in, recovering from or preparing for is emotional, a metaphor for the creative act. Krikzoni understands the process of making art as a reflex between attack and retreat, a constant negotiation between action and submission.
Konstantina Krikzoni (b. 1987 Chalkidiki, Greece) lives and works in London, UK. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Armatura, L’Appartement Gallery, Geneva and Nymphidia, Victoria Miro Projects. Recent group exhibitions include Eruption, Jarvis Art, New York; Anima Mundi: Here Now & Eternity, L’Appartement, Geneva, Switzerland; Chiaroscuro: A Century of Charcoal, Victoria Miro Gallery, Venice, Italy; Continuum, Frieze No.9 Cork Street, London, UK and Malta International Biennale, Valletta, Malta. In 2024, Krikzoni participated in the Philippe and Marion Lambert Residency in Crete, Greece and in 2023, was artist in residence at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy.