The Apartment is pleased to announce the opening of the new gallery with an exhibition of works by Emi Avora. For her debut at The Apartment, Emi Avora presents a number of large-scale paintings and a series of watercolours of opulent interiors.

Mostly monochromatic, Avora’s paintings exude an odd sense of beauty, somewhere between grandeur, decadence and, occasionally, repulsion. With a multitude of references from the baroque to 19th century symbolism and contemporary architecture, the artist paints claustrophobic worlds that hover between abstraction and representation, fiction and reality.

These multi-layered and gestural works bring to mind the expressionistic machismo of German painting, only to subvert it. This negotiation with the history of painting is of utmost importance to the artist who instead of focusing on ‘the act of painting’, follows the discourse through the eyes of one of her favourite literary figures, the art critic and aesthete Joris- Karl Huysmans. Avora re-introduces the theme of beauty, a subject almost forbidden in the era of late modernism. A reference to William Blake’s poem, the title of the exhibition implies an epiphany of beauty, which undermines reason and momentarily overturns our understanding of the world.

The artist’s recurring use of chandeliers and staircases suggests an overt theatricality that oscillates from the raucous to the absurd. In ‘Forest’ a set of trees is planted inside a grand living room; in ‘Entrance’ a tiger is freed and usurps the lavish interior. A disorientating perspective in several of the more architectural works is equally unsettling. Avora is interested in arresting the psychological dimension of these spaces. Her understanding of beauty is overpowering, relating to an aesthetic, spiritual, and, at times, metaphysical sublime.

Emi Avora (b. 1979) is one of the most successful young Greek artists. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Greenberg Van Doren, New York and Galerie Truebenbach, Cologne. Selected museum exhibitions include ‘Defining the Contemporary’ at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, ‘ In Present Tense’ at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and ‘Paint-id’ at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. Avora’s artwork has been featured and reviewed in a number of prestigious publications including The New York Times Magazine. Concurrent with the exhibition at The Apartment, her work is on view at the Alex Mylonas Museum in Athens.

The exhibition The Tiger in The Theater (From Baroque to Superama) continues through December 19, 2009. The opening reception is on Thursday, November 5, 8-10pm, in the presence of the artist. For further information and press images, please contact the gallery.