Courtesy National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens

Bia Davou, "Composition" (1960). Oil on burlap, 35 x 33 in.

March 2009 Reviews

Hans Hoffmann

R. H. Quaytman

Peter Rostovsky

Josephine Taylor

Alex Bag

Kirsten Stoltman

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Renée Green

Superflex

Anna Barriball

Holy Inspiration: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Art

Hanne Darboven German Conceptual Artist Hanne Darboven Dies at 67 Gemma Holt Deutsche Bank Shares Works with Guggenheim Come for the Art, Stay for the Sales

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

At times, viewing the retrospective of a late artist can make you feel out of sync even as it offers a sense of awkward familiarity — an experience comparable to that of, say, watching a poorly dubbed film. In their survey of Bia Davou’s work, however, curators Tina Pandi and Stamatis Schizakis overcame this potential difficulty, setting up a chastening show that eloquently unveils the true face of this important avant-garde Greek artist. Although medium-size in scale — many works being hard to obtain — the exhibition had pace and was accurately balanced, offering a representative sample of Davou’s melancholic oeuvre. A mysterious inner radiance glows behind her pieces: from the metal constructions and linoleum plates of the flowchart-inspired Grids (1967-70) and Circuits (1973-75) to the impressive Serial Structures 2 — Odyssey (1978-85), for which the artist copied Homericverses and arranged them in Fibonacci sequences and other arithmetic series, using ink and pencil on graph paper or stitching the phrases onto fabrics. Serial De-re-structures, a daily drawing diary she kept throughout 1992, is an unsparing account of a life on the edge, a chilling portrait of a descent into death (the artist died of chronic kidney failure in 1996 at the age of 64). Davou’s work impresses not only through its occasional flashes of fatalistic grimness, but by the sheer austerity and discipline of her thought, which proves that she retains a greater pertinence today than a lot of her contemporaries. Perhaps that is why, unlike Hanne Darboven’s systematic operations — an obvious reference point — this kind of purism gets right under your skin.

"Bia Davou" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.