Irini Mavromatidou | Within the scope of

Irini Mavromatidou's expansive, old, painterly, chapped kitchen table is covered and stacked with black and white portraits in miniature format and works cut into ovals from archival cardboard, the size of the palm of your hand.

Multicoloured, finely chiselled bands adorn the edges. Their filigree design is reminiscent of our grandmothers' industrious bobbin lace around handkerchiefs and little balls.

As everything lies there in its idiosyncratic iconography of amulets, votive tablets, miniatures... I randomly reach into the ovals... hold one at eye level... will it become a mirror?

How do I see myself? Asks the dialogue and gets lost in it; wanders along the ornaments, looking for support.

Everything needs a frame, meditates the imago, so as not to fall out of the frame.

As random as associations with the artist's works may seem, they are nevertheless fed by the motifs of pictorial history, the history of images that everyone has carried around with them for generations - and which want to come to light in dialogue with Irini Mavromatidou's objects..

Does the artist not hold a dialogue with herself, with the viewer in her works? Doesn't she get in touch with herself and pass on her aesthetic experience?

Over the years, Irini Mavromatidou has developed an artistic identity; she has fantasised and imagined a "sign language" that transcends time and temporal circumstances, one that wants to move on and progress.

Her view of the world, her love of small things, her personal pictorial inventions remain still in snapshots, translating what she hopes for into moulded thoughts.

Each work resembles a protocol of processes to make the "world" their own... and the result wants to be on stage.

Thus the gallery becomes its frame.

Merret Wohlrab Bielefeld, October 2015