The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens presents from November 9th, 2011 until March 18th, 2012 the new work by George Hadjimichalis titled George Hadjimichalis. The Painter A.K. – A Novel in the framework of the series ΕΜSΤ Commissions 2011, with commissions by the Museum that are realized with the kind support of Bombay Sapphire gin.
George Hadjimichalis’ new project, entitled The Painter A.K. – A Novel, is an installation that consists of 265 small and medium-sized paintings, 27 photographs, a structure and a video, which comprise the retrospective exhibition of an imaginary painter. Adopting the practice of a novelist, Hadjimichalis envisions a fictional person and creates his artwork, telling a story. It is a work open to multiple readings and includes a plethora of references and correlations. In this work, Hadjimichalis connects the personal to the collective, the experiential to fantasy, fiction to reality, identity to otherness, and the self to the Other. The work also contains an underlying autobiographical element, as the life of the imaginary painter inevitably meets that of the novel’s creator. In this narrative piece, George Hadjimichalis addresses issues such as the human body and the human soul, illness, loss, memory, psychosis, and death.
The title of the project and, by extension, the title of the exhibition, is, in essence, the information given about a book. George Hadjimichalis is the author, the painter A.K. its title, and the type of the book is a novel. It clearly concerns a visual novel, which isn’t written in words but images, mostly painted but also photographic and moving (video), which took approximately four years to make.
Through A.K.’s psychological state, Hadjimichalis tells us, indirectly, about his own story, his own journey through art, his own thoughts, desires, needs, phobias and preoccupations, revealing secret moments from his own life. A quest for the self through the Other, as well as of the self as the Other, is ultimately the raison d’être of the entire project.
Curated by Daphne Vitali
CATALOGUE
Editor: Daphne Vitali, George Hadjomichalis
Text: Daphne Vitali, Savas Mikhail, Ulrich Loock
ΙSBN: 978-960-8349-58-2
Number of pages: 360
Language: Greek / English
Dimensions: 16,5 x 12 cm
Publication year: 2011
Αvailable for sale: 25 €
EXTRACT:
[…] The starting point of George Hadjimichalis. The painter A.K.. A novel is the construction of an Other person, and its objective is to tell the story of that person’s life. By constructing a new person, Hadjimichalis is charged with imagining the details of his identity, namely his gender, his ethnicity, his age, the time in which he lived, his occupation, state of mind, etc. Therefore, Hadjimichalis puts together a character that is, primarily, of interest to him, for his own personal reasons and artistic preoccupations. So we have a male artist, a painter in particular, who, were he alive today, would be 87 years old, though he died at the age of 60. We could argue that these biographical details of the fictional hero are not accidental. Hadjimichalis makes his hero exactly 30 years his senior – so he could be his father’s age – and has him live to around the same age that Hadjimichalis is now.
It is obvious that the name A.K., in the case of this particular piece, is not merely a pseudonym, as in A Moment in the Mind of Mr. A.K., but a heteronym, to use Fernando Pessoa’s literary sense of the word. Just as Pessoa attributed his works to literary alter egos, so Hadjimichalis, in a similar way, doesn’t just choose a pseudonym for this piece, but creates a character with a complete identity, an alleged biography, a particular physique, and a personal painting style. He creates, in other words, an artistic alter ego, which he then confronts. The difference is, of course, that Hadjimichalis makes us aware of this practice, highlights it, in fact, in contrast to the Portuguese author, who kept it quiet. […]
Daphne Vitali
SPONSOR
With the kind support of:
