Strong In Time
Rena Papaspyrou - Aspa Stassinopoulou

Curated by:
Maria Marangou

Contemporary Art Museum of Crete
32 Messologgiou St., Rethymno

 

The Contemporary Art Museum of Crete, holds on Saturday, April 6, 2024, 7 - 9 pm, the opening of the exhibition, entitled Strong in Time. Rena Papaspyrou - Aspa Stassinopoulou, curated by Maria Marangou.

It is the work of two women who declared their presence in art in the 1960s-1970s, without appeasing their audience’s interest till today.
Rena Papaspyrou (1938) and Aspa Stassinopoulou (1935-2017) belong to the category of artists who made a breakthrough in the established art of time and place. They asserted their personal truth, with the result that their work remains recognizable and powerful.

The CCA has a fairly important collection of works by both artists. And these works, which form the backbone of their career, are exhibited. The Alpha Bank Art Collection is kindly participating in the exhibition, lending a monumental work by each one of them. This gesture gives both the Bank and us the opportunity to recall and honor the memory of the collector, President Yannis Costopoulos and his sister Annie, Vice President of the "J. F. Costopoulos" Foundation, sponsors of Greek cultural organizations and artists. We thank for the initiative of the Foundation’s Director, Irini Orati, and the Senior Specialist of the Alpha Bank Art Collection, Dr. Despoina Tsourgianni.

Papaspyrou-Stassinopoulou, therefore. They were friends, they were both descended from the cause of the important revolutionary movement in art history, modernism, they were fellow wanderers in using creatively post-modernist concepts, as illuminated by the master Marcel Duchamp, and they sealed their appreciation of each other with a common work. A performance of Aspa moving, wearing an artwork of Rena’s as a garment, in the courtyard of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, few months before Aspas' death.

James Joyce's quote in his book "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is fitting for both of them. "Intellectual crankery is better out of this movement than in it".

Rena Papaspyrou connects her work from the beginning with hard materials, cut roof-tile forms, photocopies that follow forms. Her then past was about learning the art of mosaic at the Athens School of Fine Arts, along with painting, while her then present was about the life of the old houses in the city that were being demolished to become apartment buildings.   
These old houses can have a new life. Climbing up a ladder, the artist, in Pagrati, Lavrio or Psiri, with cutter knives and glues, deconstructs entire wall surfaces, giving another form to the material. A manual action, with rules of painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre, since this active movement contains elements of ritual. Here, the large surface of the pre-existing wall will be subjected to observation, visual stimuli in the existing cracks that will continue or give birth to forms. These are the "Images in Matter", the "Magic Rooms", the "Baalbeks". A world of ghosts and fantasies that mocks the resplendent surface of the civilization that will replace the ruins of the old world.
When the houses will be demolished and the old materials will be put on the market, Rena will acquire as many mosaic tiles as possible (the ones that were in the kitchens and yards) for a new visual game that will continue the investigation of the birth of emerging forms. Fragments of nature, human heads, animals.
Rena Papaspyrou's entire work refers to random signals and actions. The same is true of the works that take the form of a wall or a painting frame or a garment, all of which do not have a material find but create it with small paper pieces that form an entire surface one next to the other. The poetic force of the fragile structure, with individual episodes and folds, produces a relief, sometimes monumental work with a linear mode of production. 
And here I cite Max Ernst's text "Beyond Painting" where he refers to the obsession of the visual challenges of any materiality that is confronted with the visual field and by observing it creates images. But the great Botticelli, too, believed that if you throw a sponge dipped in paint on the wall, it will make a stain which, when observed, makes a beautiful landscape.

Throughout her life, Aspa Stassinopoulou understood life as art and art as a game. She claims that she learned nothing at school, failed the entrance exams at the Athens School of Fine Arts, then went to Paris where in that school she was allowed to do whatever she wanted. Then Tsarouchis appeared, with whom they walked all day and smoked in cafés. She posed for him, however, for the “Four Seasons”. That is, there was a teacher, the streets and the cafés, a second teacher and the third and decisive one, May '68 in Paris with the wonderful graffiti on the walls and the atmosphere of a game with great seriousness.
Aspa Stassinopoulou was one of the first women in the arts to do a performance, while upon entering surgery in London for a serious breast operation, she used the Super 8 to record the event. The work first appeared in Greece in 2004, in the exhibition "Suffering Body", a production of our museum, firstly at Rethymno and then at Athens. The rest of Stassinopoulou's performances have been left in some photographs (such as "The Nude Descending" an homage to her other teacher Marcel Duchamp) or in the memory of those who saw them.

This is the time when I enter Aspa's studio and search, in the absolute clutter, for the documentation of her work. It is impossible. In her retrospective exhibition at the Benaki Museum in 2010, sponsored by Alpha Bank, the works are dated approximately.
Essentially, Aspa's work is divided between prehistoric and classical beauty and political art. "Nikes», "Apollo», «Youths" large monumental works and the streets, police violence during the Parisian May and the dictatorship in Athens, the objects from houses, and another category, the immigrants.
Aspa Stassinopoulou, loved the beauty of ancient Greek art and worked with aluminium and neon on it while blessing the victims of a cruel world by imprinting on wood, plastic, nails, photocopies.
The materials of her own time, the thoughts that haunted her and the tender reference to her whole life in the phrase "I love you, say it with rocks".

The duration of the exhibition will be until October 30, 2024.


Contact:
CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM OF CRETE
Municipality of Rethymno - Directorate of Culture - Department of Museums
32 Messologgiou St., 74 100 Rethymno
Τ: +30 28310 52530
E-mail: info@cca.gr - http\\\\: www.cca.gr


Search for photographic material of the exhibition at:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/rcasvgf9nb5qollikwqxj/h?rlkey=bix3b5dg1gxypa6ficq998s5a&dl=0


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