Modelling Phenomena
Christos Tzivelos

“Modelling Phenomena” is the first book/monograph for the visual artist Christos Tzivelos (1949-1995). This book highlights the full breadth and complexity of Tzivelos’s career, one of the most radical and distinctive greek artists of the ’80s and ’90s. Including exhibition image archives since 1977-1995, unknown work, early work and his studies-references, this volume salutes on an assiduous research on the artists working path, implying his social ideals and values as a visual artist and as a person. His work is timeless, he was a visionary, an observer, a thinker.

“It has now been four decades since Christos Tzivelos worked on the “Rhetoric of the Image”, the series that marked the beginning of his brief yet concise career in art. In the eighteen active years before his untimely death in 1995, the artist managed to leave behind a remarkable body of sculptures characterised by originality, cohesion and maturity. Using mainly light, he created a series of poetic and highly meditative images that justify his place among the most gifted Greek visual artists of the ’80s and ’90s. This first retrospective of Christos Tzivelos attempts to record and present the traces of a “falling star” to a broader public. Entitled “Modelling Phenomena”(after one of his works), the exhibition presents the key moments in his oeuvre, highlighting its lesser-known or unknown aspects. It comprises works made between 1977 and 1995, starting with a replica of his interactive installation for the exhibition “Mito e Realtà” in Bari, Italy, and ending with an unfinished drawing from the series “Lights-Fossils”. The exhibition underscores the relation of Christos Tzivelos with semantics, Greek mythology, philosophy, alchemy and cosmology. It also traces the different stages in his work, with an emphasis on the three-dimensional, self-illuminated installations for which he was best known. Also presented are his intangible works, such as the projections of insects, the spherical glass bulbs, the photographs, and the drawings from the “Lights-Fossils”series. A wealth of material from the artist’s personal archive (sketches, models, handwritten notes, invitations, catalogues and books) are exhibited in showcases, along with the screening of a digitised film, courtesy of Diohandi, with Tzivelos’s early installations in the context of group exhibitions of Greek artists abroad. Christos Tzivelos defined his engagement in art through the intellectual and manual processing of nature. “The artist’s hand,” he said in an interview, “can cultivate a relationship with natural phenomena such as light.” Today the curator’s hand comes as a well-deserved tribute to point out a rare case of an artist.” —Christopher Marinos, Bia Papadopoulou

Edited and Texts by Christopher Marinos, Bia Papadopoulou
Design by Studio Lialios Vazoura

Language: English, Greek
Pages: 304
Format: 210 × 280mm, hardback
Edition: 600 copies

December, 2017

ISBN: 978-618-83082-2-0
Co-published with The Benaki Museum