Artist: Eleni Giannopoulou

Eleni Giannopoulou (b. 1994, Greece) is a Greek sculptor and installation artist. A native of Thessaloniki and Crete, she trained at the Angel Academy of Art in Italy before receiving an MFA at the New York Academy of Art. In 2014, she won first prize in the Art Renewal Center International Scholarship competition. She is a three-time recipient of the Elisabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and a recipient of the Panepinto Family Foundation Scholarship and the David Kratz and Gregory Unis Scholarship. She has also been awarded the Chabb Fellowship from the New York Academy of Art for which she exhibited in Tribeca, NYC in September 2018.   She has shown work in Florence, Miami, Toronto, New York, Mexico City, and Athens. She is currently living and working in Brooklyn after recently returning from the Desierto 14 Residency in Mexico City. Her next upcoming solo show will open on the 5th of March at Hionas Gallery, New York City.

Her Constructions and Installations are created based on an unorganized unity of family stories, mythologies, the perception of past history narrated from multiple sources, and her view of current reality. Greek Culture and upbringing connect with the detached specialization of everything she has been experiencing in New York City.

Giannopoulou’s work presents stills of a global society’s choreography always balanced to collapse, narrate sensitive dramas with the absence of the characters emphasizing their existence, their hidden anecdotes. Mexican Legends, my grandma’s old underwear, and a piece of chair found in Chelsea. Then the narrative is born, only to get lost into a new world created by the materials, their story, and the accidents. Through her work, Giannopoulou attempts to create the intimate environments of characters that don’t exist but resemble altars of respect and curiosity for reality’s contemporary antiheroes.