Kalfayan Galleries are pleased to announce the representation of the Estate of Nausica Pastra (1921-2011) and to present the first posthumous solo exhibition of the artist’s work in Athens. Titled “NAUSICA PASTRA: The surface as origin, the concept as foresight in the work of Nausica Pastra (1921-2011)”, the show opens on Saturday, 16 December, 12.00 – 16.00. It follows on two major retrospectives of Nausica Pastra’s oeuvre at the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki and the Modern Greek Art Museum of the Municipality of Rhodes (both in 2014). The analysis and visual presentation of the ideas in her work is by Emmanuel Mavrommatis, emeritus professor of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
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Curator’s text:
The exhibition focuses on a specific period in the work of Nausica, between 1980 and 1992. Using creative juxtapositions with indicative works from earlier phases, the exhibition explores the shift that took place between 1980 and 1992 from an artistic practice organised on the surface to an artistic practice organised in space. This shift was the beginning of a substantial change by which her original concept —Square-Circle-Synectron, 1968-1976— took a different direction.
Initially, Nausica’s work was centred on the intersections of the square and the circle, albeit within a system (1968-1976). This system is a dominant emblem in the exhibition and an introduction to subsequent presentations as the precondition for her ensuing reasoning. It is the key to understanding the period approximately between 1968 and 1980, the next stage of which continued in the period from 1980 to 1992. This was the General working method which presupposed the Premise (as an Axiom), the Analysis and Synthesis of the Premise, then the Analysis of the synthesis and the Synthesis of the new analysis of the Premise, and so on. This system was cyclical, with the induction or the abstraction (the analysis) of the Premise leading to the generation or the relations (the synthesis) of the Premise, and the generation or the relations of the Premise derived from the prior induction or abstraction of the Premise being analysed anew by their next induction or abstraction of the Premize, and so on.
To Nausica, this General working method was the prerequisite for any artistic behaviour and the potential application of it on any object. This is the reason why she saw the General method as a work itself and as originator for the potential creation of any other work. It was a tautology (the General working method – as a producer of work – is itself a work) and hence reflected her orientation and reference to the minimal-conceptual trends of the 1960s and 1970s, in which Bernard Lamarche Vadel places her in his introductory text to Nausica’s catalogue (Analogiques, Denise René, 1976) for her solo exhibition Amplitude fictionnelle et signes de définition / Fictional amplitude and signs of definition as well as in two subsequent texts in 1979 and 1982. At a next stage, the work of Nausica went on from its initial organising of the relations of the circle and the triangle on the surface (1968-1976) to their relations in space, so that this organising became space itself. (1980-1992).
Two distinct logical consequences came from the initial two-dimensional installation. One was the analysis grids (sculptures) which were the correlations of the squares in a specific installation, Square-Circle-Synectron, set in relations of apposition or overlaying, of frontal or axial perception (sections); the other was the synthesis spheres (sculptures) of spheres and cubes in space, again in a specific installation, Square-Circle-Synectron. Nausica wanted her work to be read as a flow of successive reflections; as one reflection.
