Antonis Donef
29 Sep - 30 Nov 2012
ANTONIS DONEF
29 September - 30 November 2012
The Breeder is delighted to announce the representation of artist Antonis Donef. His first solo exhibition at the gallery will open on September 29th 2012. The show includes new works, intricate ink drawings on the pages of vintage books. An imposing element in the exhibition is Antonis Donef’s eight meter long work, that the artist had been working on for the past two years. (2010-2012). Donef’s practice reflects the controversial relation of the artist with the power which is imposed by the printed media. It is essentially an act of rebellion against the conventional procedure of consuming knowledge through books. Donef’s art divides into three separate phases, each of which is stirred by its peculiar creative necessity. At first there is Donef the collector, the hunter and gatherer of rare printed matter. He strolls through the second-hand and antique bookstores in hunt for old encyclopedias, almanacs, illustrated reference books and any other odd manuscript he can lay his hands on. At the same time, his beloved books and especially those compilations of a body of information commonly called compendium, represent the static and purely subjective knowledge of a certain time period of human history. Tangled in this bizarre love and hate relationship with the printed word Donef the assembler – the second phase of his creations – emerges. After a careful and often agonizing selection he tears the pages out of the books, rearranges them by his own rules and sticks them onto the canvas. The written pages of presumptuous knowledge – yellowed by time, saturated with history and often rendered indecipherable to the common viewer as written in languages not using the Latin letters such as Greek, Russian or Chinese – lie flat on the canvas, incoherently arranged side by side giving the viewer a purely pictorial impression. At this point the artist proceeds to the third phase – the completion of the alienation of the word – becoming Donef the miniaturist. With the use of a traditional fountain pen dipped into Indian ink – commonly used in the past to write or print books – he starts by timidly enhancing the pictures and marginalia lingering on the pages, then slowly growing bolder he works his way up to increasingly complex illustrations. An uncompromising worker (some of his paintings take up to 2 years to be concluded), Donef is a pedantic artist, his paintings focus on details and as every detail becomes part of the whole, and only in the end the dots unite and become – like stars in a constellation – meaningful when seen from afar. His depictions are reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic, tattooist Hieronymus Bosch with hundreds of themes, motives, movements, images and figures filling the picture. In-between: the printed symbols of the Chinese description of a steam engine or the differentiation of traditional Rumanian costumes in Cyrillic letters. Donef makes use of the printed media as a base to his own narrative, which often continues, stretches and alters already given lines and forms. By rendering illegible the page he deprives it of its first and fundamental function. In fact he creates a new one, totally estranged from the accessibility of a potential reader. By deconstructing the traditional meaning of the word, by dispossessing the page from its main function and finally subjugating it to the base of his paintings, Donef elevates the book and its content to pure art, giving it the infinitive meaning each spectator encounters in his own personal epiphany. Only then, in this fourth and final phase, the apotheosis is complete and the written word acquires a new, pictorial meaning. Antonis Donef (b. 1979) lives and works in Athens. He is a graduate of the School of Fine Arts of Athens. Donef has works in the most prominent private and institutional collections like the Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation among others. He had been awarded with the “Art House Shanghai Residency Award” in 2010. He has participated in numerous institutional group exhibitions (at the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Teriade Museum in Lesvos and more). Antonis Donef will be included in the upcoming Vitamin D2, a major new book to be published by Phaidon in 2013, which is an international survey on contemporary drawing. His work will also be featured this fall in Palais De Tokyo in Paris, in the exhibition “Hell as Pavillion” that Nadja Argyropoulou is curating as part of the “Garden of Eden” exhibition.
29 September - 30 November 2012
The Breeder is delighted to announce the representation of artist Antonis Donef. His first solo exhibition at the gallery will open on September 29th 2012. The show includes new works, intricate ink drawings on the pages of vintage books. An imposing element in the exhibition is Antonis Donef’s eight meter long work, that the artist had been working on for the past two years. (2010-2012). Donef’s practice reflects the controversial relation of the artist with the power which is imposed by the printed media. It is essentially an act of rebellion against the conventional procedure of consuming knowledge through books. Donef’s art divides into three separate phases, each of which is stirred by its peculiar creative necessity. At first there is Donef the collector, the hunter and gatherer of rare printed matter. He strolls through the second-hand and antique bookstores in hunt for old encyclopedias, almanacs, illustrated reference books and any other odd manuscript he can lay his hands on. At the same time, his beloved books and especially those compilations of a body of information commonly called compendium, represent the static and purely subjective knowledge of a certain time period of human history. Tangled in this bizarre love and hate relationship with the printed word Donef the assembler – the second phase of his creations – emerges. After a careful and often agonizing selection he tears the pages out of the books, rearranges them by his own rules and sticks them onto the canvas. The written pages of presumptuous knowledge – yellowed by time, saturated with history and often rendered indecipherable to the common viewer as written in languages not using the Latin letters such as Greek, Russian or Chinese – lie flat on the canvas, incoherently arranged side by side giving the viewer a purely pictorial impression. At this point the artist proceeds to the third phase – the completion of the alienation of the word – becoming Donef the miniaturist. With the use of a traditional fountain pen dipped into Indian ink – commonly used in the past to write or print books – he starts by timidly enhancing the pictures and marginalia lingering on the pages, then slowly growing bolder he works his way up to increasingly complex illustrations. An uncompromising worker (some of his paintings take up to 2 years to be concluded), Donef is a pedantic artist, his paintings focus on details and as every detail becomes part of the whole, and only in the end the dots unite and become – like stars in a constellation – meaningful when seen from afar. His depictions are reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic, tattooist Hieronymus Bosch with hundreds of themes, motives, movements, images and figures filling the picture. In-between: the printed symbols of the Chinese description of a steam engine or the differentiation of traditional Rumanian costumes in Cyrillic letters. Donef makes use of the printed media as a base to his own narrative, which often continues, stretches and alters already given lines and forms. By rendering illegible the page he deprives it of its first and fundamental function. In fact he creates a new one, totally estranged from the accessibility of a potential reader. By deconstructing the traditional meaning of the word, by dispossessing the page from its main function and finally subjugating it to the base of his paintings, Donef elevates the book and its content to pure art, giving it the infinitive meaning each spectator encounters in his own personal epiphany. Only then, in this fourth and final phase, the apotheosis is complete and the written word acquires a new, pictorial meaning. Antonis Donef (b. 1979) lives and works in Athens. He is a graduate of the School of Fine Arts of Athens. Donef has works in the most prominent private and institutional collections like the Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation among others. He had been awarded with the “Art House Shanghai Residency Award” in 2010. He has participated in numerous institutional group exhibitions (at the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Teriade Museum in Lesvos and more). Antonis Donef will be included in the upcoming Vitamin D2, a major new book to be published by Phaidon in 2013, which is an international survey on contemporary drawing. His work will also be featured this fall in Palais De Tokyo in Paris, in the exhibition “Hell as Pavillion” that Nadja Argyropoulou is curating as part of the “Garden of Eden” exhibition.