On Thursday, February 5 at 8.00 in the evening Maria Demetriades opens the first solo exhibition of Elli Koutsoukelli at the Medusa Art Gallery.

Starting from a theme of historic building façades and interiors, Elli Koutsoukelli presents 30 works with ink on large paper. The ink in these works is used with the gravity of oil, in thick pastes that emphasise the traces of a gestural painting. The whiteness of the paper, the only background to these compositions, comes as an absolute light that mercilessly penetrates the ruins of temples and houses to dematerialise them, projecting onto their black surfaces the power of a suspended beauty. By revealing the hidden structures of ink, identified here with the worn frames of the edifices, these works pass from the abstract representation of external reality to the monumental rendering of an inner view of the world.

Elli Koutsoukelli was born in Athens in 1984. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Painting (2002-2008) from the Fine Arts School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where she graduated with a first class degree and distinction. From 2009 till 2011 she continued her studies in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she completed a Master’s Degree of Fine Arts in Painting at the Edinburgh College of Art – University of Edinburgh. For her studies in Scotland she received the Alexander Onassis Scholarship. In 2010 she was awarded the Andrew Grant Prize for the production of outstanding artwork and the Barns Graham travelling scholarship to Italy. In 2011 she earned the John Kinross Scholarship for art production and research in Florence, Italy from the Royal Scottish Academy. She has also worked as an Artist in Residency at the John David Mooney Foundation in Chicago (2010). She has participated in group shows in Greece (State Museum of Contemporary Art, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens Concert Hall) and abroad (Chicago, Edinburgh, Liverpool, London). Some of her artworks belong to the permanent collections of the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki. In 2014 she presented her group of works “Metamorphosis of Light”