Vermeer Words - Art and Psychoanalysis
“VERMEER WORDS “
A comment on Art and Psychoanalysis
Exhibition of Maria-Smaragda Skourta (https://marsmarskou.wixsite.com/vermeer-words)
The Herakleidon Museum is pleased to present the new temporary exhibition Vermeer Words by Maria-Smaragda Skourta from 6 July to 30 September, 2023, curated by Louisa Karapidakis, Art Historian and with the collaboration of Katerina Haris, Dr. Psychiatrist for children and adolescents.
The exhibition will be held at the first floor of the Apostolou Pavlou 37 building
The opening of the exhibition will take place on Thursday 6 July at 19:30.
The artist Ms. Maria Smaragda Skourta will present at the Herakleidon Museum, in the Art and Science section, an approach to the work of the great Dutch painter J Vermeer, concerning Art and Psychoanalysis. Works of Cavalletos paintings as well as digital works, video-art installations and texts make up the set exhibited at the Herakleidon Museum entitled "Vermeer words"
Since 1980, alongside her visual arts studies , Smaragda Skourta showed a special interest in the events of psychic life ,She studied texts of Psychology and Psychodynamics and processed personal experiences under the prism of Psychoanalytic thought. Today she attempts to express a visual as well as psychic word by exploring the Vermeer's oeuvre and encountering concepts such as the symbol, the mirror , the negative , the traumatic and the seduction.
As art historian Louisa Karapidaki points out, Maria-Smaragda Skourta essentially creates a visual environment that studies the representational feedback-action from the point of view of the science of Psychoanalysis. Experiential memory, as a key narrative element, comes to restore a dialogue with the absence of J.Vermeer's original works. Works-inserts, small utopias with extracts from each of Vermeer's Paintings by the Dutch artist, perform a choreography, renegotiate space and constitute the iconography of memories. In these works, the artist studies the untold stories symbolically present in J. Vermeer's paintings, referring to gendered relationships, desires and secrets, and reveals the "representation of absence", according to psychoanalytic terminology. In her compositions, she describes and reveals the "intimacies" of the protagonists' characters. In order to illustrate the relationship with the "other", Ms. Skourta uses all artistic techniques, so that the successive transformations of the image redefine with narrative skill the symbolic meanings and activate the observer's gaze. She says: "It took me several years to re-establish a connection between concepts and the objects of Johannes Vermeer's works". As a method of reconstructing her narrative she uses a whole procedure, instead of the copy-paste approach, so that the invisible information emerges from the gaps in the visual grid. She reconstitutes the image as a function of decrypting the "self". The original colours and light are altered and sometimes darkened or densified, but they leave an indelible "psychic" imprint. Her work explores the way in which "the body that remembers" relates to the world...
As Psychiatrist Ms. Katerina Haris also mentions, Ms. Maria Smaragda Skourta's painting creates a Frame to talk about the desires and pathways that intimately cover our wandering in the work of the great Dutch painter but which is also an encounter with the psychoanalytic Other and the Self, where the shadow , the image and the object contribute to a new representation of the Ego. Ms. MS Skourta tells a story that is not personal but that personalizes the pathways of passions. Entering into visual and psychoanalytic spaces, she seeks in these Works the encounter with the Other and all the creatures that are : We
Smaragda-Maria Skourta was born and lives in Athens. She studied Painting, Sculpture and Engraving at the Athens School of Fine Arts, (1980-1996) with teachers G.Moralis, N.Kessanlis, Th.Exarchopoulos, D.Kalamaras and G.Lappas He attended a post-graduate program at the Ecole des beaux Arts (Paris) under Jeanclos and Garrant. He completed his doctoral degree at the Architectural School of the National Technical University of Athens.
She has presented important solo exhibitions of historical content in Greece and abroad, which are part of an expanding tendency of " crossings " between Archaeology and History and Art and contribute potentially to the growth, enrichment and " transformation " of our own ways of viewing Antiquity through Art in today's context.
Her creative work has been hosted in emblematic spaces in Greece and abroad since 2000.
In 2005 she visited the Historic place of Pompeii and exhibited the entire relevant unity at the Italian Cultural Institute and the Museum of the City of Athens.
Site Pompei Antiqua: https://pompeiantiqua.wixsite.com/marsmarskou
In July 2022 he exhibited at the Christian & Byzantine Museum the whole Unity "Byzantine Transcriptions" with the titles of the exhibition: "Gardens full of Light" and "Binding". https://marsmarskou.wixsite.com/soloexhibition2016
Round Table: Saturday, 16 September 19:00-21:00
VERMEER WORDS, a commentary on Art and Psychoanalysis
Participating speakers :
· Athanasios Alexandridis, Psychoanalyst, member of the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Society
· Grigoris Maniadakis, Psychoanalyst, member of the Hellenic Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
· Thanasis Hatzopoulos, Psychoanalyst, member of the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne
· George Tzirtzilakis, Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly.
· Vasiliki Papakosta , Art Historian,
· Georgios Lignos, Author of Aesthetic texts.
The discussion will be chaired by Ms. Katerina Haris Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist.
The event will take place at the Hellenic Section of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) 15 Agion Asomaton Square, Athens 105 53
HERAKLEIDON MUSEUM
Apostolou Pavlou 37, 11851 Thiseio-Athens / 1st floor
T: +302103461981, E: info@herakleidon.org
Daily 10:00-18:00, last entrance: 17:15
General admission ticket applies