For this year’s Residency Programme for Academic and Curatorial Research of Contemporary Greek Art we welcomed Chloe Redston in the Art History direction, from June 1 to July 14, 2024.

Chloe is from London, United Kingdom, and lives and works there. She graduated the MA in History of Art at The Courtauld Instute of Art in June 2023, specialising in ‘Wordplay: Intersections Between the Verbal and Visual c.1870 to the Present.’ Developing on themes surrounding text-image relationships, she developed a particular passion for the poetics of visual art and mark-making processes. Her primary interests, having emerged from this paper and a prior undergraduate degree in Classics (Durham University), culminated in her dissertation, entitled Abstracting the Classics: Receiving Cy Twombly, in which she reconciled the poetic and asemic content of his oeuvre through the methodological framework of classical reception theory.

Chloe Redston was selected by a committee consisting of: Caroline Levitt, Head of Art History Department, The Courtauld
Lucy Bradnock, Vice-Dean for Research, The Courtauld
Anna Somers Cocks OBE, Founder of the “Arts Newspaper”, Art Critic
Elizabeth Plessa, Art Historian-Curator
Dora Vasilakou, Managing Director, The Sotiris Felios Collection, Head of The Residency Programme.

Based on Chloe Redston’s research proposal, which focuses on the concepts of memory, identity, and Greekness between past and present, a bespoke six-week program was designed, including visits and guided tours to exhibitions, museums, and art institutions, as well as meetings with artists from the Sotiris Felios Collection and art professionals in Athens.

Chloe’s experience culminated into a written essay entitled “A Living Past: Contemporaneity and Tradition in the Paintings of the Sotiris Felios Collection”. The text explores the dynamic relationship between tradition and contemporary artistic practice through The Sotiris Felios Collection, which is centred on contemporary Greek figurative painting. Focusing on the work of four artists — Christos Bokoros, Kostas Papanikolaou, Stefanos Daskalakis, and Alecos Levidis — it examines how contemporary Greek painting draws from the past not as a burdensome inheritance but as a generative source. These painters engage with personal, collective, historical, and aesthetic memory to shape a visual language that is both rooted in Greek artistic heritage and open to universal interpretation. The collection is approached not as a static archive but as an active space of cultural negotiation, where the notion of Greekness(ελληνικότητα) is continually reimagined, serving as a bridge between past and present, the individual and the collective, the material and the immaterial.

Curator of the programme: Dora Vasilakou
The Residency Programme for Academic and Curatorial Research of Contemporary Greek Art is supported by The other Arcadia Foundation and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.