Bia Davou

Bia Davou, Sails, 1981, fabric, Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), installation view, ANTIDORON. The EMST Collection, Fridericianum, Kassel, photo: Nils Klinger

In the late 1960s, Bia Davou adopted a serial methodology as the organizing principle of her practice. She developed a unique body of work interweaving cybernetics, mathematics, the Homeric myth of Ulysses’s travels and Penelope weaving the veil, poetry, as well as personal tragedy. Her artistic praxis was formed through a meticulous and laborious practice based on a combination of manual handicraft and industrial manufacture: she printed circuits on copper Bakelite, made drawings on graph paper, and installations of clusters of sail-like triangular textiles embroidered with Homeric verses and mathematical sequences.

Serial De-re-structures, a work composed of 367 drawings produced in the span of one year at the rate of at least one drawing per day, stands as a culmination of her practice. Materializing the dictum “nulla dies sine linea” (no day without a line), Davou reconstructs and deconstructs linguistic and pictorial elements of her visual vocabulary, in a dialectical relationship to the Homeric notions of “Nostos” and “Thanatos” (longing and death) as a transcription of existence.

Posted in Public Exhibition