Antigoni Kavvatha - Artist on Hydra Island Greece

Antigoni Kavvatha was born in 1955 in Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied painting in the School of Fine Arts in Athens with G. Moralis and completed graduate studies in New York and Boston (MFA Boston University). She has hosted twelve one-woman shows and participated in 60 group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Her work can be viewed in public and private collections throughout Europe, USA and Asia. She currently resides in Athens, Greece.

In a World of Shadows



The surface and the depth, the obvious and the obscure, the speakable and the ineffable, the familiar and the threatening, the sharp and the vague, meeting points of two different worlds, the process of transition: Antigoni Kavvatha suggests paths between light and darkness, in compositions characterized by excellent technique—acrylics on mylar and charcoal on paper.

She exploits the clash of white and black, the ambiguity of greys, the texture and density of color. Her work is characterized by the juxtaposition of opposites, the relief-like character of the surface, the plasticity of the shapes and forms, while retaining a monumentality, not located in its external characteristics (e.g., in big dimensions), but emanating from an internal source.

The sense of rhythm, the special painterly sensibility and immediacy of her work are consistent with her economy of expression. The metaphysical loneliness emanating from her images leads to symbolist readings. The concrete gives way to the hidden—the mystical and magical strength of the subject—thereby gaining its own apology, its own life.

The plants and trees, with their chaotic lattices of branches, are suspended in time. They dangle at the edge of reality, imagination and dream. The implication is the charm of the unknown, the unexpected, both of which define penetration, wandering, and entrapment in a mystical abaton, an unexplored hinterland, or a mythical forest—a space where mystery, silence, our innermost fears, existential agony, mnemonic recall, passages to the past and an unspecified hereafter seem to converge.

Further compositions advance to a world dangerously threatening, even frightening, yet suggestive and contemporary. Above distant horizons, black birds mingle with fighter planes or with watch towers of German concentration camps.

Every work of Antigoni Kavvatha is charged with its own emphatic meaning. It reflects and defines the artist’s essential contact with the world and becomes a projection-confession of psychological and sentimental situations. In the aggregate, her work is directed and communicates with what is beyond the obvious—it provokes the eye and composes a unified visual proposition which is the result of systematic study, devotion, patient work and sharp observation. The culmination is pure feeling: nothing less than deep—and at times, dark—possibility.

Giannis Bolis

Art Historian