Maria Marhsall

New Frontier, Sundance Film Festival 2009

16.01.09 - 24.01.09

Maria Marshall
New Frontier, Sundance Film Festival 2009
16 - 24.01.2009

Maria Marshall is featured artist at the New Frontier, Sundance Film Festival 2009

International artist Maria Marshall is the main independent filmmaker at this year’s New Frontier (the celebrated artist Pierre Huyghe was the focal point of the Frontier screenings in 2007). She has also been commissioned by a New York Foundation to make a six-screened installation entitled The appropriation.

Maria Marshall has been a known quantity in Greece since her “Sirens” exhibition in October 2007. Staged at the Potnia Thiron gallery in Athens, the show centred around Sofikon Epidaurus 31.08.07, a work she shot on 35mm in Greece for Greece.

The Sundance Festival is the most important independent film festival in the US. Now in its 25th year, the Festival presents the world premiers of works by independent filmmakers from around the world every January in Park City, Utah.

Seminal works by Maria Marshall like When I grow up I want to be a cooker and Playground (both of which are now in museum collections) will be screened daily between January 16 and 24. Other internationally celebrated films from her oeuvre including Lollipop, I should be older than all of you, and Don’t let the TRex get the children will also be shown in festival screens and external venues.

Potnia Thiron has decided to mark Maria Marshall’s participation in the Sundance Film Festival with a book of stills from her film 58 Days Later; the volume will be presented in Greece in the spring of 2009.
The film was made in Chennai, India, in a place where “the tsunami devastated the shore and took many lives”. The exhibition catalogue and press releases will be on display at New Frontier on Main in the lounge area along with the gallery’s posters and promotional material for the artist.

Alecos Fassianos, Maria Marshall, Antonio Riello, Aphrodite Litti

2007 Contemporary Istanbul

28.11.07 - 02.12.07

The Potnia Thiron Contemporary Art Gallery will be at the Contemporary Istanbul art fair with four international artists: Alecos Fassianos, Maria Marshall, Antonio Riello and Afroditi Litti. As a gallery, P/T stands out for the dynamism which is evident in its choice of artists: starting out with its Fassianos exhibition, P/T showed the recent work of an artist who has consciously opted for the ‘eternal comeback”, to return over and over to the (pure and authentic) style that made his name, and to prove that far from being a trap, repetition and stylization have actually served to proclaim his identity and personal history as the “only internationally significant contemporary Greek artist of his generation”.
Our next step was the show by film artist Maria Marshall, whose work, responding to the duality of the mythological creature referenced in its title—“Sirens”—is simultaneously alluring and disturbing, seductive and repellent. In Sofikon Epidaurus, a work being shown at Contemporary Istanbul, the ritualistic element provides an enigmatic link between yesterday and today which offers itself up for decryption.
The politically incorrect or unorthodox, a concept embodied in P/T itself, is also manifest in the irony and sarcasm of Antonio Riello’s work. In the artist’s hands, guns, hand-grenades and artillery shells—objects associated with violence and brute force—are transformed into feminine accessories and decorative items for the home. Sex, power, kitsch and the dialogue between utility-object and art-work come together as core ingredients in a show by an artist who knows how to approach the viewer playfully without undermining the underlying seriousness of his work.
Finally, Afroditi Litti’s metal constructions shed light on the transcendental coexistence of subject and material: small, light, fragile creatures and elements of nature acquire a volume, weight and tangible substance at odds with their reality. Such insignificant commonplaces of the Greek countryside as a pine kernel and an insect are rendered monumental and allegorical, while her outsize ring functions as a preternatural reminder of its historical, religious and often emotional and recollective importance; mere jewellery no more, it has become an object of timeless symbolism.
The work of the four artists on show—side by side yet autonomous; autonomous yet engaged in dialogue—comprise four separate manifestations of a shared view of art which shuns reassurance and compromise in favour of the risks of creative conflict: just like P/T itself.

Maria Marshall - Antonio Riello - Aphrodite Litti

Art Athina 2008

23.05.08 - 25.05.08

Potnia Thiron at Art-Athina

For the second year running, the Potnia Thiron contemporary art gallery will have its own stand at Art-Athina with works by Maria Marshall, Antonio Riello and Aphrodite Litti. Three artists with distinct personal styles who use their imagination, a keen eye for reality and—above all—their masterful technique to induct us into a parallel world thick with meaning and grace.
The celebrated British film artist Maria Marshall will be present with her new work 28 weeks later, an exceptional video encapsulating the features that made her name on the international art scene: her devastatingly critical approach to issues including the mental world of children, innocence, and the challenges of growing up and behaving maturely in ‘adult’ environments.
Maria Marshall’s new work for Potnia Thiron also includes two zombie movie posters, the first taken from her new work 28 weeks later, the second--entitled 28 days later--from SOFIKON-EPIDAURUS, which she made in Greece for Greece last summer. The latter ended up intertwined with one of the greatest ecological and national tragedies in modern Greek history, as the site chosen for shooting the film, a historic chapel in Sofikon just a mile or two from the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, was the scene of unbelievable destruction wrought by the great forest fires of 2007. The work was shown at the Contemporary Istanbul art fair in 2007.
Antonio Riello, the Italian artist known for an allusive, if not downright playful, approach to his subjects, which generally engage with common behaviours, perceptions and interpretations tests the limits once again of the mechanisms determining what is acceptable and what is not. Using real weaponry, he creates a personal universe of automatic rifles, revolvers, hand-grenades and bullets decorated with precious stones and luxurious fabrics. At Art-Athina, he will be showing KARINA, a German Luger PO8 pistol, and STRELA, a Russian sniper rifle, both reworked in Riello’s inimitable fashion.
The Potnia Thiron stand will also feature work by Aphrodite Litti: GIRL, a sculpture of a dream-like girl in brass with Murano tesserae, and one of her Pop fantasy butterflies. Both works are from her recent show at Potnia Thiron, “A.Litti in wonderland”, whose catalogue was prefaced by the author and professor of Criminology Eugenios Trivizas.
Visitors will be able to form a more holistic view of Antonio Riello’s work in the space designed for Art-Athina’s open plan by the exhibition’s curator, Bettina Maria Busse. The works on show there will include his impressive BOMBING, an installation consisting of a table and 12-piece dinner service decorated with depictions of weapons; his RENAISSANCE AIRPLANE BOMB, a ceramic bomb made out of genuine hand-painted Faenza pottery; and his CERAMIC CREST 2, a second wall-mounted hand-painted ceramic installation consisting of 16 plates and 2 weapons in genuine Faenza. As Giannis Panousis, Professor of Criminology, aptly notes in his introductory text to the catalogue accompanying the artist’s show at Potnia Thiron last November, the artist’s choices seek to familiarize us “...with the artistic, rather than the technical, side of weapons. To draw our attention to their artistry, their colours and combos, their trim, adornments and nomenclature”.

Alecos Fassianos - Jorge Pardo

Art Athina 2007

30.05.07 - 03.06.07