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02.06.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Alekos Fassianos’ Hellenic Designs Offer a Fanciful Take on Ancient Greece 

The simplicity of Greek classical and folk art was an eternal muse for the late artist Alekos Fassianos. Best known for his paintings, which blend ancient iconography and contemporary scenes in vibrant swashes of blue, red, and gold, his overtly Hellenic influences and signature palette also gave birth to a wide range of furniture designs. Carwan Gallery in Athens is presenting the first retrospective of these pieces, following the artist's death last year, and they’re just as transportive and delightful as his 2D works.
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09.29.22

Interiors

For a New Artist Residency, Five Up-And-Coming Studios Remake a Traditional House in Greece

For 4Rooms, an artist residency on the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo, Società delle Api’s Silvia Fiorucci, alongside Salone del Mobile editorial director Annalisa Rosso, tapped four up-and-coming designers — Studio Brynjar & Veronika, Phanos Kyriacou, Julie Richoz, and UND.studio — to totally make over one room of the house each, with the French studio Superpoly taking over the common areas (including the excellent kitchen, above).
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10.19.21

Fair Report

Highlights From the First Fair to Showcase Contemporary Greek Design in a Historical Context

Despite a canonical place in the annals of art and architecture history, Greece has been quiet on the contemporary design scene. Earlier this month, though, the inaugural Athens Design Forum offered a confident counter-narrative — one that asserts the country's creative relevancy and seeks to “mark Athens as both an emerging and historically established center of creative production.”
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07.20.20

Up and Coming

Polina Miliou’s Paper Pulp Pieces Have So Much Personality She Sometimes Gets Mad At Them

Whether chairs, macaroni-shaped light fittings, or knotted, tubular standing lamps, Polina Miliou sees her pieces as creatures. “I often start from an archetypal furniture form and gradually twist it into more of a character,” she says. Once she’s sculpted their form, she dresses the pieces in a final smooth layer of papier-mâché. “It is a slow but fun process, during which I literally slap and caress the furniture,” she says. “The time I spend with each piece lets me build a personal relationship with it."
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01.07.20

Up and Coming

Meet Three (More) Rising Stars Defining the Greek Design Scene

To work in Athens in 2020 is to work in a city that is both global — and, as such, ripe with opportunities for cross-border collaborations — but also very particular. Whether focusing on local problems with global impact, like the Greek capital’s distinct lack of recycling facilities, or creating collective arts organizations, making of any kind here is always situated within a local context. To get a glimpse into the growing Greek design scene, we recently caught up with three of the country's most exciting young talents.
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09.29.14

Excerpt: Book

First Impressions of Greece, by Mary Manning

Sam Cate-Gumpert, of the artist’s book publisher Peradam, had, like many of us, been following the photographic essay that is Mary Manning’s life through her blog Unchanging Window for several years before he approached her with the idea of publishing a collection of her images in a real-life book. Initially, Manning explains, she had a whole other idea of what the book would be, but then a succession of events — a spontaneously booked vacation to Greece with her girlfriend Monique and a gift from a friend of a very beautiful copy of Henry Miller’s First Impressions of Greece (accompanied by an elaborate list of tips and recommendations for the trip), led to a very different publication. Manning says that upon receiving the copy of Miller’s book she knew instantly that instead of what she had been planning, her book would be ‘Greece and Monique. Impressions’. The images, which were all captured on film, were curated into the gentle rhythm seen on these pages by Manning herself and show all the characteristic genius of her previous work.
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11.21.13

Travel

Kiosk in Athens, Greece

There were several reasons Alisa Grifo wanted to take her Kiosk co-founder Marco Romeny to Greece for their newest themed collection of everyday objects, which launches today. But the most pressing was the fact that Greece's ongoing economic woes have shuttered scores of small businesses, and continue to do so the longer they persist. "It felt like half of Athens was closed," says Grifo, who traveled there with Romeny in early October. "We would find something and try to contact the manufacturer and their phone would be disconnected. We felt an urgency to go now before more and more disappeared." The irony is that Greece is also the last collection for the couple before they're forced to pull their own disappearing act of sorts, thanks to economics of an entirely different kind.
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