EVENTS

The exhibition of Katerina Serafetinidou entitled The Secret Breeze of Hydra will be inaugurated at the Historical Archives-Museum of Hydra, on Friday 28 June 2024, at 19:30

This thematic exhibition will include more than fifteen representative mixed-media paintings, large and medium size, inspired by the artist’s research and wanderings, winter and summer, in Hydra. The historian-archivist Dina Adamopoulou,, stresses among other things about her painting: “Katerina Serafetidinidou is one of the most important and talented figures of contemporary Greek painting. The exceptional painter draws inspiration from the rich cultural and natural beauties of our country, while at the same time exploring international artistic influences, combining traditional and contemporary styles in her work. Using a wide range of materials such as sand, dry powder pastels and newspaper collage, she is interested, as she states, in making the viewer of her works a participant in her own thoughts and interpretations. Through her art, Serafetidinidou tries to connect aesthetics with emotion and contemplation, with an unsurpassed, poetic, one could say, sensitivity, with the same soulfulness and the same always honesty and sincerity, characteristics that distinguish Katerina as a person. Her strong point is undoubtedly her landscape paintings and when these relate to the place she lives and worships, the unique Hydra, then the artist takes off her images, translating her simple and everyday experiences and the current experiences of the island’s atmosphere into an extremely expressive art“.

Katerina Serafetinidou was born in Athens in 1967. She studied applied economics, marketing and advertising in London, where she came into direct contact with contemporary art and studied the work of the great artists at the National Gallery of London, the Tate Modern and the Royal Academy of Arts. In addition, she attended classes with renowned artists from Central St. Martins in London and Art History seminars at the Museum of Cycladic Art, the American College of Athens and online at MoMA. She participated in group exhibitions at the Stavros Niarchos Cultural Foundation in Athens and in the international presentation of young artists in the form of a slide show at MoMA in New York. In 2024 she successfully held her first solo exhibition at the Skoufa Gallery. In recent years she has been working persistently between her studios in Athens and Hydra.

The art critic and theorist Takis Mavrotas writes in the exhibition catalogue: “The view of Hydra and time define the axis of Katerina Serafetidinidou’s recent painterly quests, since, with her paintbrush, she moves between the struggle of the heart and the mind, the ego and the we. Again, the journey, the place and the time, give her the impetus for her painting action, with the same certainty about the tones, the balance, the volumes and the “building” of her images. Light, through or over Hydra, moments distant from the world and the bright summer sun, lead her to complete her recent body of work as a continuation of her landscape approaches from her exhibition at the Skoufa Gallery. Serafetidinidou has been wandering, usually alone and rarely with people very close to her, for about thirty years on the beaches and mountains of Hydra, like a seagull on a boat, hoarding sensibilities and emotions. Serafetidinidou is a tracker of landscapes. She paints with a sense of sobriety and harmony. She disregards lyrical detail and immerses her gaze in the earth and sky, touching the unexpected beauty of nature. These enigmatic landscapes, sometimes fleeting and sometimes melancholy, give precedence to the act of painting, to the sense of the fleeting moment, to the preciousness of time and space. These are occult landscapes, with a limited scale of low tones, subtle tonal gradations, contrasts of light and shadow”.