Installation shot Phantoms. ©William Bennington Gallery
PHANTOMS is the first solo exhibition by Greek artist Vasilis Asimakopoulos with William Benington Gallery, examines how echoes of an experience or event can sometimes seem to remain present within a place or space.
When we step into an empty community hall, municipal waiting room, a faculty or studio, we sense the shadows of its past, an accrual of the mundane, a history of the everyday. Similarly, when visiting the site of a significant or tragic event we can feel something of the weight of shared emotion felt by a community. In Phantoms, the artist invites us to be sensitive and receptive to this idea, to look for the common ground between a landscape and an event, and to bring to it our own personal experiences.
Asimakopoulos takes familiar objects and changes or remakes them, subtly shifting our perception of them and allowing us to reevaluate our associations and assumptions. Elsewhere he makes studies of surfaces, white on white, built up with marble dust. As we find ourselves trying to find an image or pattern for our eye to fix onto, searching for meaning, these surfaces screens for our own projections. Throughout, dust is all-pervasive – marble dust, soot and brimstone (sulphur) – perhaps from a busy sculptor’s studio, or detritus from a forgotten history. The overall effect is dreamlike; an image conjured up from a half forgotten memory, familiar yet distant. A phantom.
VASILIS ASIMAKOPOULOS – PHANTOMS Private View: Thursday 15 February 6.30pm – 8.30pm Exhibition open: 16 February – 30 March 2018 WBG London Projects 50 Tower Bridge Road Bermondsey London SE1 4TR williambeningtongallery.co.uk
