Opening reception Friday, October 29, 6-8pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is delighted to announce Dancers by Athens based artist Christiana Soulou. This is her first solo exhibition in New York.

In Christiana Soulou’s newest series of sixteen deeply intimate and intense drawings she explores the theme of dance. Drawing is the artists’ sole medium and for Soulou it has always been an exquisite vehicle for the investigation of the deepest mysteries of self and of existence.

In this new body of work, dance emerges not as the mere presentation of dancers but as metaphysical and formal aspects rhythm, pose, and symmetry. Rather than being portraits, they are Soulou’s impressions of different people she has encountered. Soulou’s dancers each exemplify a moral model suggesting particular states of being. The figure-drawings hint at particular contemporary styles and attitudes that often remains hidden in the ubiquitous characteristics of a dancer’s physique and performance attire. With physical movements minimally suggested, each drawing flows into a kind of symmetrical repetition, creating an overall of rhythm throughout the entire exhibition. Soulou’ s dancers appear to move with the greatest possible lightness, a way of carrying the weight that seems to be in absence of gravity, accurately defined by the Renaissance term as “Leggiadria”.

“Because after all, the cause of dance itself, is to succeed that state where gravity appears absent, or better to say, where materiality is transformed – with all its weight – into something immaterial.”

Christiana Soulou was lives and works in Athens, Greece. She studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris. She has staged solo exhibitions throughout Europe and participated in group exhibitions including Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, at the New Museum, New York, Athens Biennial, Athens, In Praise of Shadows, IMMA, Dublin, and Panic Room: Works from The Dakis Joannou Collection, DESTE, Athens, and Of Mice and Men, the 4th Berlin Bienniale, Berlin. This is her first solo exhibition in New York. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.