The exhibition presents 13 artists who live and work outside the major urban centers. The title The Ruralists does not imply a movement nor trend, and certainly not a coherent artistic movement, as in the case of the group Brotherhood of Ruralists, founded in 1975 around the pop artist Peter Blake, which suggested the restoration of a bucolic English landscape as central subject theme in paintings.
The artists of this show barely deal with landscape paintings, although the theme of open landscape runs the exhibition as a fact; however it is not present in every artwork. Away from the urban life and the suffocating dimension of the city, the horizon of the work and the artist are expanding in order to incorporate naturally the everyday practices, imagination, craftsmanship, inventiveness.
Paintings and sculptures, photographs and installations are created by a plethora of materials and techniques that are related to the environment. All the projects generally avoid the drama without lacking the drama. Time arises as the key question and as a primary value in this group exhibition of artists in Athens, aiming to resemble a sunny rural courtyard during a December day.
The group show is co-curated by Angeliki Antonopoulou and Alexios Papazacharias.
Participating artists: Petros Efstathiadis, Manolis Zacharioudakis, Katerina Kana, Ioannis Kolliopoulos, Zissis Kotionis, Margarita Myrogianni, Apostolos Ntelakos, Paola Palavidi, Alexios Papazacharias, Leda Papaconstantinou, Thanassis Totsikas, George Tsakiris, Alexandros Psychoulis.