Geography (Images in Matter)

Rena Papaspyrou uses terms such as “geographies,” “episodes,” and “images through matter” to describe the main directions of her multifaceted practice that has unfolded from the late 1960s to the present. In 1982, in her third solo exhibition at Desmos Art Gallery in Athens, she presented the series “Geographies,” which effectively inaugurated the broader body of work titled “Images in Matter.” Her research begins in the urban environment: from there, she selects and brings to the fore sheets of metal, doors, wooden planks, fragments of walls, tiles, dust, and other material remnants. She is drawn to matter as a carrier of images that reveal themselves on its surface, often through the gradual wear brought by time. In this work, a stripped wall surface becomes a field for reading: using pencils, she marks the seemingly “accidental forms” of the cracks, transforming them into expanses, countries, borders, and seas—into geographies. As art historian Katerina Koskina notes, these interventions reinforce what we might call “the illustrative potential of matter.” The work was first shown in the exhibition “Emerging Images” at Europalia (Antwerp, 1982), and later in other presentations, including the “Geometries” exhibition (2018), organized by Onassis Stegi.