Myrto Stampoulou

Stampoulou Myrto

Myrto Stampoulou was born in Athens in 1975. She studied painting at Athens School of Fine Arts and journalism at the Ergastiri school (Laboratory of Professional Journalism). In 2007 she completed her MFA at the Glasow School of Art where she studied with the full scholarship of the foundation of scholarships of the Greek state (IKY). She has present solo shows in Athens and Glasgow. She was a member of the artist group Libby Sacer Foundation and now a member of its evolvement into Libby Sacer’s Daughters. She has worked on set and costume design and artistic direction for cinema and theatre productions.

Works

Solo Exhibitions

2020

The Gruen Effect Zoumboulakis Galleries Athens

2010

Where Is My Shadow Market Gallery Glasgow

2005

+Pegnia Zoumboulakis Galleries Athens

2004

Inner view To Milo gallery Athens

Press

The works of these three years are rooted in my thoughts and anger about power structures, the construction and performance of gender roles, the suppression of any attempt to move away from them, and the need for survival, contact and sensuality within these conditions. The archival photographs that were the raw material for the works symbolize or reflect an aspect of reality that I cannot pass over and somehow have to manage. Zombies, porn, fruit from commercials, diamond mine, gold mine, desert, dumpster diving, a great bodybuilder, the socialist father of the mall, fembot (“female” robot), screaming flowers, flower-pot, ASMR online care, TV screens, Oppenheimer and Mr. a.: close to the logic of collage, I chopped up the original photos to assemble them like simple Frankensteins that each only needed two corpses. It’s a practical way of thinking around the sources and the emotions they carry. So I have the feeling or illusion of making them my own and through this process I alter them, reveal them in a different light, maybe poke holes in them that go in other directions, maybe make something beautiful out of something ugly, or show something beautiful in the ugly by focusing in a different way.

The general title, which was decided upon after first completing the series, and discussing their sources and my previous work, places the hybrid landscapes and creatures of the drawings within the environment of commercialization and apparent safety, comfort and disenchantment. Supermarkets and malls: ideal settings for Zombie films. Despite their sources and the stories and information they carry, my aim was for the works to communicate or convey to the senses something deeper and independent of the thoughts and interpretations that the original images were capable of. They make a story on their own, from the shapes, sensations of the landscapes, poses and gestures without any further information in relation to their origins.

Myrto Stampoulou

*Excerpt from Myrto Stampoulou’s interview at avmag.gr, 2020.