Artist: Vasilis Papageorgiou
Title: Birds!
Venue: Una Milan, Gallery
Photos: UNA & the artist
Papageorgiou’s practice explores themes of togetherness, communication, and loneliness, while reflecting on the expression of leisure in everyday life. He focuses on semi-private or semi-public spaces – such as bars, beaches, or local football stadiums – where people reclaim their right to spend time alone together.
These environments offer moments of freedom, allowing individuals to experience a sense of community while maintaining personal solitude. In his recent work, Papageorgiou draws on the sculptural language of coastal architecture and human intervention to examine the politics of tourism and its effects on both the environment and the human body. His work engages with the depletion of natural resources and the physical and mental strain of contemporary life. Through this lens, he opens up new imaginative spaces, questioning the values and systems that define modern existence. Birds! serves as both a footnote and a continuation of Papageorgiou’s recent institutional exhibition in Austria, Sunseekers or Dimming the Sun or, where he reflected on capitalist systems of pleasure, their role in the cyclical exhaustion of planetary resources, and the paradoxical loop they create around the need for rest and regeneration. At the heart of his show at UNA is a series of swans – symbols of hospitality and care – crafted from copper-plated towels, commonly used in hotels to welcome guests and create an inviting atmosphere. Papageorgiou places the swans atop mirrored steel pedestals, seemingly unbalanced, evoking the reflective surface of the water and alluding to the myth of Narcissus – a metaphor for the vicious cycle of egoism and individualism. Also featured in the exhibition is the work series Business and Pleasure, which consists of beach umbrellas supported by bronze casts of the artist’s hand and foot, depicted as strained and stretched, as if they were captured in moments of work or extreme stress. These body parts serve as both the literal and metaphorical foundation of the umbrella, bearing the weight of its structure and providing shade to shield visitors from the sun. In doing so, they symbolize the often-overlooked relationship between tourism and labor, where the body itself becomes a structural support for leisure. The installation is accompanied by a new series of drawings titled Awning and the Moon, inspired by the awning systems commonly seen in Athens – the artist’s hometown. The balcony drawings are paired with marble elements reminiscent of the moon, creating a poetic interplay between light and shadow, and engaging with themes of protection, exposure, and the rhythms of day and night. An awning serves as a boundary between the hidden and the visible, the backstage and the foreground, the observer and the observed. Vasilis Papageorgiou’s overall practice constantly oscillates between private and public spaces, carrying different connotations; especially of labor and productivity.
