We are very happy to announce our successful applicants! Congratulations to all!!!

Zoë Lewis -USA (April 2023)
Tee Chandler -United Kingdom (April 2023)
Alisha Trimble -USA/Greece (April 2023)
Jan Blythe -USA (May 2023)
Daniela Parhisi - Switzerland (May 2023)
Jonathan Monaghan -USA (June 2023)
Pina Piccolo -Italy (June 2023)
Michelle Mansour-USA (June 2023)
Amelia Konow -USA (July 2023)
Sophia Casas -USA (July 2023)
Barbara Boissevain -USA (July 2023)
Kate Domash -UK (August 2023)
Agne Zotis -USA (August 2023)
Adar Keilin -Israel (September 2023)
Katherine Parker -USA (October 2023)
Phoebe Lo -USA (October 2023)
Louisa Catherine Schmolke -United Kingdom (October 2023)
Helen Karanika -Canada (April 2024)
Nina Elder -USA (November 2024)


Emerging and established artists, and other creative minds from all over the world are invited to apply for the Cycladic Arts Residency. Curators, writers, poets, translators, scientists wishing to find a place for retreat or to focus on their projects are also encouraged to apply. Applications are open year round and results are announced every month.

Summer 2022: Cycladic Arts first group exhibition

(is)land of dreams, curated by Dr Kostas Prapoglou.

Participating artists: Giorgos Kontis (GR/Berlin), Sandra Osborne (USA), Sandra Ramos Lorenzo (Cuba/USA), Dimitris Rentoumis (GR), and Dimitra Tzivelou (GR)

Opening reception: Saturday, July 23, 2022.
Duration of the exhibition: July 23 - August 28, 2022.
Open: Tuesday through Sunday, 7:30-11pm.


[is]land of dreams
curated by Dr Kostas Prapoglou


The Cycladic Arts Residency proudly presents its debut exhibition at its magnificent brand-new renovated space located at the village of Alyki, in the southwestern corner of Paros island, Greece.
For this show, five international artists respond with new and recent works to ideas around the importance of home, belonging and identity, simultaneously taking into consideration how all these collide with our perception of locality and the understanding of our own self. The employment of a different medium by each artist, transmits a polyvocality of vision and the diverse survey of esotericism and imagination.

Giorgos Kontis (Greece/Berlin), Sandra Osborne (USA), Sandra Ramos (Cuba/USA), Dimitris Rentoumis (Greece) and Dimitra Tzivelou (Greece) become storytellers of their own dream; a dream that is interpreted through the filter of personal experiences, socio-cultural influences and inspirations.

How is a dream formed? To what extent does our unconscious feed our present self? These are questions that are explored and perhaps partially answered by each participating artist, taking into account their unique personal references and the particular emotional condition they find themselves at the time of creation. This has always been a personal and prolonged esoteric journey that orientates or disorientates us throughout our life.

Capturing the ephemeral quality of memory, all works urge us to investigate and scrutinise our self-reflections. They spark a dialogue about the meaning of our existence and the ways we trace our past and understand our present.

Characterised by an occult minimalism, all works emerge as imprints of thoughts. They have a close relation to the surroundings we all are accustomed to, but they simultaneously construct an amalgamation of undefined feelings; they channel a putative notion of the unknown. The works embrace a process of abstract documentation and an attempt to archive chaos and harmony, encouraging us to explain who we are and what our purpose is.

On an ancient land where the earth perpetually gazes at the bright sun light and shares its endless myths, we find plenty of dreams. They all speak about our origins, our fears, our guilty pleasures and our future. Such dreams are here to help us re-calibrate our spirit towards the actuality of life, its manifestations and its beautiful endless possibilities.







Artist bios and statements


Giorgos Kontis

Untitled,
2022.
Encaustic on silk, upholstery studs, 46 x 36 cm

The work of Giorgos Kontis focuses on abstraction, on the simplicity of painting forms, and on a sense of the minimum. Materials such as wax, natural silk and the encaustic technique, with the sensuousness and tactility they have, play a central part in his practice, aspiring to the formation and use of a language that functions through the senses and the gaze.
--
The work of Giorgos Kontis (b.1981 Athens) focuses on abstract painting and on its function as an image. Kontis studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, at the Academy of Visual Arts (AdBK) in Munich and at the University of Arts (UdK) in Berlin. He holds a MFA from the St. Joost Academy in Breda, the Netherlands, and recently completed his practice based PhD in Painting, at the Royal College of Art in London, on the notion of Authenticity. He lives and works in Berlin and Athens.

Recent shows include: matter: echoed, BARK Gallery Berlin Lab (solo, curated by Polina Piagin); Ground Suspended, CRAMA Showspace Berlin (solo); Rebetiko, City of Athens Arts Centre (curated by Christophoros Marinos); Mother Tongue, Crux Galerie Athens (solo, curated by Katerina Nikou); fAN Archive, Vienna Art Foundation, Parallel Vienna 2018, Vienna (Exhibition concept/design by Herwig Müller); The Materiality of the Painterly Event, City of Athens Arts Centre (curated by Denys Zacharopoulos); Close, Closer, Fading, Lychee One Gallery London (curated by Jonathan Miles); Project 1 // On Authorship, Space-Projects, Amsterdam (curated by Maud Oonk); Neither Innocent Nor Guilty, Daily Lazy Projects Athens (curated by Giorgos Kontis); Bow Open, Ian Kiaer's studio (solo project), Bow Arts London; O, Kunstbuero, Vienna (with Just Quist); The Same Sky, Lepsien Art Foundation, Düsseldorf.


Sandra Osborne

murmur (2019). Unglazed porcelain, 12.7 x 47.6 x 4.5 cm

A murmur is, among other things, words spoken so softly as to be barely recognisable as speech; it is the misty area between language and sound, between content and form. These porcelain boxes are a visual murmur, an unruly storage system to which there is no access. As memory is to experience, intertwined but not twins, system becomes object, an artifact of meaning.
--
Sandra Osborne (b.1959, USA) is a San Francisco, California, based visual artist. She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2012. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at Headlands Centre for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; the San Francisco de Young Museum; the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA, among others. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Hatch Gallery in Oakland, California, The History of the Sea (2012), and FIELD Contemporary in Vancouver, British Columbia, Dead Letter (2014). In 2016, she presented a large-scale outdoor installation of porcelain sculpture, The History of Trees, in the exhibition Digital Nature in Los Angeles, California, a Natural Discourse project curated by Shirley Alexandra Watts.


Sandra Ramos

Aquarium, 2013. 3D animation, 4’ 22’’. Edition 1/6.

Aquarium is a brief symbolic narrative animation based on a series of paintings by Sandra Ramos related to Cuban emigration, politics and history. More existentially the piece is related to the idea of the almost invisible limits that separate us from freedom both individually and collectively and how much we should fight to find our place in the world. The girl dressed as a Cuban pioneer (elementary student) is confined in a transparent glass fish tank. She is trying to escape those glass limits, but many different things happen to her and numerous obstacles appear, until finally thanks to the union of all people, the aquarium is broken and the island is released to be reborn into a new cycle.
--
Sandra Ramos (b.1969, Havana, Cuba) lives and works in Miami, Florida. She completed her MFA at SFAI California in 2021; she graduated from the Higher Institute of Art in Havana in 1993. She is a Cuban – American multimedia visual artist and curator who achieved international reputation since the 90's by expressing her personal critical relationship to political and social realities in Cuba and the world by using a wide range of materials and techniques such as video, photography, paintings, installation and etchings.
Ramos work is in the collections of: MOMA NY, MFA Boston, The San Diego Museum of Art, PAMM, National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, The Bronx Museum, ASU Museum; The Ludwig Forum Aachen; TBA21 Vienna, Fuchu Art Museum in Tokyo and others. 


Dimitris Rentoumis

Self was surface, 2017. Graphite, acrylic paint, charcoal, and ink on papers, 100 x 250 cm each

The works on paper presented at the Cycladic Arts Space are processed on both sides with ink and graphite. Some of them are exhibited as floor pieces and can be seen more as objects in the space than as painted images. The way they are presented is variable, with folds or fully opened. Their manufacturing process involves painting the paper with graphite and ink and then erasing it with sandpaper. Erasure is translated as an attempt to restore the original form but this is not possible. There is surface fatigue and the marks become permanent. The constant repetition of this process eventually leads to their corrosion. It causes perforations and tearing, like an excavation through drawing which in the end reveals nothing but the very materiality of the works left in the surrounding space. They are fragile surfaces that resist gesture to a degree of annihilation.
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Dimitris Rentoumis (b.1980) is a visual artist based in Athens, Greece. His works encompass large-scale collages and double-sided drawings with ink and graphite on paper, sculptural installations and abstract video projections. In his practice, Rentoumis examines specific aspects of drawing, sculpture and the moving image in close relation to concepts such as materiality and process, vulnerability and fragmentation, and the boundary between 0image and object. He studied painting in Athens School of Fine Arts (2007-11) and he completed his master degree in the Netherlands (Academy St. Joost 2012-14). He has presented his works in shows in Greece and abroad and he has participated in residencies such as the Jan Van Eyck Academy (2016-17) and Onassis Air (2019-20).


Dimitra Tzivelou

Untitled, 2022. Chinese ink and graphite on paper, 60 x 60 cm.

The starting point of Dimitra’s Tzivelou work is the black and white and the biggest colour contradiction between them. The aim of this contradiction is the creation of a visual illusion being influenced from the movement of Op Art. Her basic interest is the ambiguity of these colours with the possibilities and the delusions of the visual ability of the individuals. The circular shape that comes from the works refers to the primitive circle and the beginning of simplicity related to Gestalt psychology. The works are being created from internal to external with small infinite lines that come across together curt and intensive. The paintings negotiate the concept of the vacuum, the pause or the continuity, the absence or the completion, the order and the disorder as concepts that they complement each other.
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Dimitra Tzivelou (b.1980, Athens) studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts in the painting department with professor R. Papaspyrou. Her master's degree was at the Athens School of Arts in painting and philosophy. The influence on her work comes from the Op Art movement, the art of illusion. Exhibitions in which she has taken part are: Perceptions, 2concept store Thessaloniki; Cheap Art Space Thessaloniki; Cheap Art Space Athens; Group in fusion, Pop-Up Show Athens; Black Jack Rhodes, Group Show Melina Merkouri Athens; 6th Visual Arts Festival Thessaloniki; Group Show old market of Kypseli Athens; Group Show municipal gallery of Karditsa; I scream, you scream, we all scream for.., Athens. She lives and works in Athens.