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Born in Greece and currently based in Singapore, Emi Avora is drawing subject matter from her everyday life in Asia as well as her Greek ancestry with a focus on a combination of interior spaces still life and landscape. Her paintings are entering a dialog with modernist historical canons as well as ponder on our ambiguous relationship to exoticism, our environment, motherhood and the everyday. The search for her own rediscovered ‘place’ and ‘identity’ as well as curiosity for the shapes that surround her are elements that occupy her compositions. Often her paintings present encounters or ‘conversations’ between seemingly disparate objects or symbols. Sometimes dreamy, sometimes intense and with the use of light on the driving seat, her work employs a range of heightened palettes to allow the viewer space for re-invention, creating a gap between looking and making, between the real and the imaginary. By the act of re-imagining, Avora enters into an escapist realm albeit parallel to the real.
Everyday observations become exaggerated through the use of colour and change of scale, focusing on what surprises her or grasps her attention. Reality is juxtaposed with mythology and observed situations are weaved into fictional compositions that allow a multitude of readings. Equally, the very process of her mark making opens up a platform to investigate painting’s power to transcend imagery by breaking it down to the basics of colour, shape, pattern and composition.
Emi Avora is a Greek born, UK trained (Oxford University and Royal Academy Schools) and Singapore based artist. She has exhibited world wide with solo projects including the National Theatre of Greece Athens, South Square Arts Centre, UK, The Apartment Gallery, Athens, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York and Gallery Truebenbach, Cologne. She has participated in a number of group shows including Studio Voltaire, London, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, The Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. Her work can be found in private as well as public collections in Europe, Asia and the USA, including The Wonderful Fund collection, Marsh collection, Central Bank of Greece collection. She has also been an Elizabeth Greenshields recipient and her work has been in various publications including ArtMaze Magazine, Create Magazine, Artist Friend, the New York Times and Defining the Contemporary, The Whitechapel in Association with Sotheby’s. She is one of the 2020 Delphian gallery open call group exhibition winners and she exhibited recently at Nouri/Appetite,
Singapore (solo) as well as JW PROJECTS, Singapore. She currently has a solo show at Art Seasons, Singapore.
More info:
Website: https://emiavora.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erasmiavora
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