The
Museum Alex Mylona – Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art presents the
exhibition Alex Mylona, A different World, curated by Denys
Zacharopoulos, Artistic Director of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary
Art. Artworks from the permanent collection of the Museum (sculptures,
drawings, paintings, collage) will be presented at the show, which opened on Thursday, April 14 and
will run until July 3, 2016.
Alex Mylona wrote in 1983:
“I have put down my thoughts on life, art and my own work on various
occasions. The years go by and life steadily deteriorates. Wherever one turns,
there is nothing but devastation, rape, murder. Mud, dirt and corpses, dominate
the landscape. Violence reigns. Man has become a defenseless creature, afraid
to walk alone in the street. The use of drugs is spreading fast, taking a
foothold in Greece, as well. Quick profit and self-interest rule. Athens has
become a hideous city. The air is foul; at times it’s difficult to breathe. The
Acropolis is submerged in a yellowish cloud of pollution. The sun can barely
find its way into our houses. The blue of the sky seems to be fading. The sea,
which we once believed would one day feed the whole planet with its organic
wealth, is also hopelessly contaminated. The fish are slowly choking to death.
Hope for a better future is rapidly dwindling.
What is left? The human race taking pride in its handiwork!
Artists, poets, philosophers, mesmerized, watch the
spreading destruction around them. They try to cry out – in vain. Their voices
die in their throats. In a world of callous indifference, greed and violence,
what can possibly be the role of the artist, the scholar, the intellectual? I
suppose that as long as there are human beings on this earth, there must be
some hope left. So, like Penelope, all we can do is go on weaving the cloth of
life in the daytime, even if it is only to be undone again at night. What sort
of monuments can we built when the very ground shifts under our feet? What is
there left to praise, to honor, to glorify - where are we to find a foothold?
We can only wait; perhaps one day some kind of light will emerge. Until then,
let us each resist the forces of dissolution as best we can. We may still be
able to create another world out of the ruins, if not a better world, at least
a different one.”
(From the retrospective exhibition
catalog at the National Gallery, 1986).
Biographical note
Alex
Mylona was born in Athens in 1920. Her parents, Maria and Thrasivoulos
perceived at an early stage her talent in design and at the age of 8 she
started her first lessons in drawing. In 1940, Mylona married the young layer
and thereafter politician George Mylonas. In 1945, though she already had two
daughters Mylona attended the Athens School of Fine Arts, where she studied
sculpture at the Michalis Tombros lab. Mylona participated in numerous
exhibitions, including the 1952 Pan-Hellenic Exhibition at the Zappeion and
Gallery Knossos in 1953. Meantime her third child, Alexandros, was born. All
her three children followed her to the art, being acclaimed artists: Maria in painting, Eleni in mixed
media and Alexandros in theater. Alex Mylona cooperated with Gallery Zygos,
Nees Morfes, Polyplano, Gallery Athinon, in Greece and abroad. In sixties
represented Greece to the 30rd Biennale in Venice, where the critic Herbert
Read was enthusiastic supporter of her works.
In 1962, participated at the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture in Paris, at
the International Fair in Montreal in 1967 and at various Biennale exhibitions
in Brussels, Alexandria, Buenos Aires and Budapest. During this period she
maintained an atelier in Paris near Montparnasse and met many sculptors
including Arp, Giacometti, Zadkine, as well as the painters Atlan and
Schneider. In 1986 the Greek National Gallery organized a great retrospective
exhibition. In 1988 presented her work at Gallerie Denise Rene in Paris. In
2002 she started to generate her last creation, the Museum Alex Mylona. Alex
Mylona died in Athens in May 2016.
According to Denys
Zacharopoulos, curator of the exhibition and artistic director of the
Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art,
“Alex Mylona has been
concerned and worried about her time and age since the beginning of her
artistic journey. She has also experimented with a great variety of expressions
of the artistic moment. She actively took part in the turns of history as a
woman, as an artist, as an intellectual and as a citizen. She has worked with
almost the entire range of materials and tried most techniques. She was as open
to the younger artists as she was to her more established peers. At the same
time, she was open to the changes of artistic trends and to the social cultures
while participating in the constant movement of time. Her life took place in
the public space in the heart of the city, as well as in the ascetic distance
of the countryside and of nature. She cared as much for her Greek identity, as
for the international language of art, therefore combining locality with
universality in her life and oeuvre.
She has always been a feisty
and dynamic woman, among the most emancipated of her generation. At the same
time, she is a particularly tender and generous artist dedicating her interest
and curiosity to the young ones. The relation of sculpture with the public
space in her work has been historically documented, even if many of her public
projects were never realized. Together with the group of artists that were
presented at the Greek Pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 1960, she expressed
the most progressive and modernist tendencies, the most radical artistic and
personal expressions of that generation in Europe. The Museum Alex Mylona was
conceived as a way for her work to go out of the studio and reach the public
dimension of the sculptural world - not due to the usual artistic vanity, but
due to the real need for the permanent dialogue with time that the artist
expressed from the beginning. For this specific reason she took herself a great
care obsessively in order to create a real museum architecturally,
museologically, functionally, aesthetically, economically in every detail. With
an equal generosity to the one that brought the public in contact with her work
at the museum, Alex Mylona realized that she could not be a museum director. In
order to be free again and continue her work as an artist, she decided to
donate the museum to the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art. As she said
herself, “the museum has not to be a mausoleum but a living organism”. Since
the museum’s opening as a public space she decided thanks to her lively temperament
to dedicate the largest space of the museum to the exhibition of works by
younger artists and thus, supported new artistic trends and projects. Today,
Alex Mylona, having completed her ninety-sixth year of age, proves by her work
and general stance in life that she continues to be a young artist, herself.
After the temporary suspension of the functioning of the museum due to the
general crisis, but also due to the more specific crisis that culture suffers
in our country, together, we decided to open the museum again to honor the
young and dynamic artist, Alex Mylona. The exhibition under the title “Alex
Mylona, A Different World” inaugurates the discussion on her work with the
younger generations and allows beyond any sense of retrospect the richness,
complexity and versatility, “polytropon” as Homer says, is not of the man but
of the woman, not of the muse but of the artist.
The Macedonian Museum of
Contemporary Art together with Alex Mylona’s children and friends, invite
younger artists, many of whom have already been exhibited in the museum, to a
gathering that will open the museum in a festive manner.”
Brief activity report of Museum Alex Mylona
The Museum, keeping with Alex Mylona’s original vision
while supported by the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and under the
artistic direction of Denys Zacharopoulos, has organized temporary exhibitions,
where a lot of acclaimed artists have been presented. To name just a few:
Athanassios Avranas, Alexis Akrithakis, Dimitris Andreadis, Dimitris
Antonitsis, Eugenia Apostolou, Yannis Varelas, Vassilis Vassilakakis, Airs,
Georgiou, Constantinos Giannaris, Vaggelis Gokas, Daniel, Lydia Dambassina,
Christos Delidimos, Dimitris Dimitriadis, Irini Efstathiou, Vassilis
Zidianakis, Mary Zygouri, Vassilis Zografos, Lizzie Kalliga, Eleni Kamma, Niki
Kanagini, Nikos Kanarelis, Kostas Karahalios, Vassilis Karouk, Zoe Keramea,
Nikos Kessanlis, Stylianos Kontomaris, Yannis Kounelis, Constantinos Ladianos,
Panagiotis Loukas, Pantelis Makkas, Christos Bouronikos, Margarita Bofiliou,
Maria Mylona – Kyriakidi, Constantinos Xenakis, Sotiris Panoussakis, Ioanna
Pantazopoulou, Maria Papadimitriou, Nikos Papadimitriou, Natasha Papadopoulou,
Ilias Papailiakis, Christos Papoulias, Nafsika Pastra, Efthimis Patsourakis,
Pavlos, Maria Polizoidou, Chryssa Romanou, Vassilis Salpistis, Yorgos
Sapoutzis, Costas Sahpazis, Takis, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Alexandros Tzanis,
Costas Tzolis, Christos Crissopoulos, Yannis Psychopedis, Alexandros
Psychoulis, Mantalina Psoma, Marina Abramovic, Carla Accardi, Blind Adam,
AVAF, Francis Bacon, Michael Bevilacqua, Cosima Von Bonin, Herbert Brandl,
Thomas Brasch, Günter Brus, Scott Campbell, David Casini, Max Ernst, Lucio
Fanti, Carsten Fock, Gerald Förster, Greta Frau, Ry Fyan, Torben Giehler, Johan
Grimonprez, Sandy Hanna, Rebecca Horn, Markus Huemer, Thomas Grünfeld, Sissel
Kardel, KAWS, Mike Kelley, David Kennedy-Cutler, Ed Kienholz, Martin
Kippenberger, Bernd Koberling, Peter Kogler, , Inez Van Lamsweerde + Vinoodh
Matadin and M/M (Paris), Pierre Labat, Alexander
Lee, Hanna Liden, Kalup Linzy, Nate Lowman, Saverio Lucariello, Markus Lüpertz,
Brice Marden, Helen Marden, Bernhard Martin, Jakob Mattner, Marlene McCarty,
Allan McCollum, Bjorn Melhus, Marilyn Minter, Heiner Müller, Vik Muniz, Hermann
Nitsch, Thierry Noir, Michael Portnoy, Rob Pruitt, Robert Rauschenberg, James
Rielly, Wolfgang Rihm, Kirstine Roepstorff, Dieter Roth, Lisa Ruyter, Gerhard Rühm,
Tilo Schulz, Andres Serrano, Shoplifter, Koji Shimizu, KimSooja, Mariella Simoni, Josh
Smith, Daniel Subkoff, Octavian Trauttmansdorff, Daisy De Villeneuve, Franz
West, Oswald Wiener, Robert Wilson, Michel Würthle, William Wood, Aaron Young,
Peter Zimmermann, Otto Zitko, Heimo Zobernig.
Since 2007, the Museum Alex Mylona has participated in
numerous Festivals and cooperated with Museums, Collections and cultural
organizations such as: Athens Festival, Athens Biennale, Thessaloniki Biennale,
International Film Festival of Thessaloniki, Athens School of Fine Arts, State
Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens Photo
Festival, Institut Français de Grèce, Instituto Italiano di Cultura, ITYS
Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, Hydra School Projects, Farnesina
Collection, Malvina Menegaz Foundation for the Arts and Culture, Association
for Contemporary Art ZERYNTHIA, Landeshauptstadt Munchen Kulturreferat, ART for
The World, I.M.A.R.E.T. Intitute Mohamed Ali.
Two videos are shown at the
exhibition:
- A record of the construction of the building and the setting of the
exhibition at the museum (Video, documentation: Eleni Mylonas, Claudette
Labrosse, Curating, Montage: Stefanos Bertakis, © Eleni Mylonas & Museum Alex Mylona, 2016)
- Alex Mylona talks about her work and guides us at the museum
(Director: Christina Katsari,
Curating: Eleni Mylonas, Camera, sound: Stefanos Bertakis, Montage:
Christina Katsari, © Alex Mylona, 2006)
Co-ordination & Press Office: Eleni Kotsara, Head of Development
& Administration
