6 ½ Weeks – KIRIAKOS TOMPOLIDIS

Kiriakos Tompolidis has set up shop in Museum Folkwang. In The Quiet Hour one steps into a kind of room long lived in; there, the artist, a native of Essen (born in 1997) toys with fragments from his memory. He has produced seven paintings specially for the exhibition, and in terms of content art history references and personal memories overlap, while formally speaking photographical elements meld with painting.

Sleep without Witness shows the artist asleep. A flowery blanket or bedspread occupies a large part of the pictorial space and ends at the edges of the canvas. The painting itself becomes the bed. Tompolidis fully exploits the exciting relationship between the image as material object and the illusionary pictorial space, as the white flowers and the lines of the pattern are actually embroidered into the canvas.

Tompolidis’ meta-painting is infused with autobiographical themes. He repeatedly composes self-portraits or scenes from the family photo album, and yet likewise draws on extensive pictorial sources that he has collected over the course of months, if not at time years. A woman with an infant at her breast it morphs into a Madonna, when he paints a Greek vase with a bouquet of flowers, the amphora references Classical Antiquity while the overall composition is reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch floral still lifes. 

Tompolidis’ grandparents moved to Essen from Greece in the 1960s. Tompolidis’ cultural influences thus oscillate between Greece, where his family originated, Germany, and Mexico where he now lives. In his works, this transcultural experience also plays an aesthetic-visual role. 

This becomes especially clear in the large picture of the open cupboard. Bowls and jars, plates, candlesticks, a Greek orthodox icon, a little China pig from Mexico, and everyday objects from various cultural contexts are placed on the shelves in no hierarchical order. The things on the racks tell of travels, of crafts traditions, and of family memories. They are the medium of personal and collective history and combine to create an indirect form of self-portrait. This can be construed as a moment in the exploration of his own identity. 

Tompolidi’s paintings open up threshold spaces in which the perception of images and likewise identities can repeatedly arise anew.

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