Art Athina: Athens
Nil Gallery presents a curated selection of works exploring the dynamic tension between opposing yet complementary forces, from September 18 to 21 at Art Athina. Chaos and harmony—rupture and renewal, fragility and resilience—are not contradictions here, but driving forces behind artistic creation.
Simon Buret transforms everyday materials such as coffee grounds, grease pencil, and oil paint into layered surfaces that balance spontaneous gesture with meditative rhythm. His work embodies the dialogue between disorder and order, revealing how layered textures can transform chaos into visual balance and invite reflection on memory, time, and materiality.
Dimitris Gketsis bridges the ancient cultural legacies of Greece with contemporary life, crafting immersive visual narratives where mythology, history, and radical imagination intersect. Engaging with issues of equality, identity, gender, sexuality, and discrimination, Gketsis gives visibility and voice to all femininities, using his practice as a lens to examine how personal and collective memory shape the present. His works provoke a dialogue between the mythical and the everyday, inviting viewers to reconsider their own histories and the ways in which cultural heritage informs contemporary experience.
Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd grounds his practice in the body, identity, and intimacy. Working on hand-dyed silks and cottons, his textured surfaces convey vulnerability alongside strength, exploring how personal narratives can become sites of transformation and resilience. Similarly, Anaïs Maar’s vivid self-portraits and compulsive motifs channel sexuality, loss, and myth into compositions that oscillate between dissolution and reconstruction. Both artists use the personal as a lens to explore broader themes of chaos, rebirth, and the continuous reshaping of identity and relationships.
Through these distinct voices, Nil Gallery presents a meditation on duality as a creative principle. The works reveal how moments of disruption and imbalance—whether personal, social, or material—can generate insight, growth, and aesthetic resonance. By juxtaposing fragility with strength, rupture with harmony, the gallery highlights the transformative potential of opposing forces. This selection invites viewers to engage deeply with the interplay of chaos and order, observing how tension, contrast, and balance can be catalysts for both artistic innovation and reflection on human experience.
