Α.Κ.
FOREWORD
The painter A.K. was born in 1924 and died in mid-1980s. From 1948 onwards, he lived in a first floor apartment at 51 Polyla Street, in the Kypriadou area of Athens.
At some point, probably in 1976, he confined himself inside his home and never left again until he died.
His last piece is a film named for his home address, which he filmed inside a black model of his house that he made himself, at a scale of 1:1 in terms of wall height, and 1:2 in terms of the plan view.
George Hadjimihalis
TEXTS
Meeting with the Other
by Daphne Vitalis
The new work of George Hadjimichalis entitled George Hadjimichalis. The painter A.K. A Novel is an installation consisting of 265 small and medium-sized paintings, 29 photographs, a construction and a video, which constitute a retrospective exhibition of a fictional painter. Adopting the practice of a novelist, Hadjimichalis envisions a fictional character and crafts his works, telling a story. It is a work with multiple readings and includes a multitude of references and associations. In this work Hatzimichalis connects the personal with the collective, the experiential with the imagination, fiction with reality, identity with otherness and the self with the Other. The work also contains an underlying autobiographical element, as inevitably the life of the fictional painter meets that of the author of the novel. In this narrative work, George Hadjimichalis deals with themes such as the human body and the human soul, illness, loss, memory, psychosis and death.
In an uncanny House
by Savas Mikhail
Through the Looking-Glass
How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty?, Alice asks her little cat. A Looking-Glass House, a labyrinth of reflections, where the familiar doesn’t appear in its true, albeit reversed, image, but is transformed into something completely unfamiliar, uncanny.
The house of the Uncanny – like the one the painter AK, the hero of George Hadjimichalis’ visual novel, confines himself in until his death. A Looking-Glass House, where the painter Hadjimichalis/Tweedledum meets and paints the painter AK/Tweedledee, who paints, in a different or even opposite way, pictures from the life and times of Hadjimichalis.
Self-portrait of the Other
by Ulrich Loock
“The work is beyond individual painting matter.” A warning.
Work is exhibited here that goes beyond. Work that defies the possible and well-established function of painting to express and confirm, if not to substantiate, the painter’s individuality. First of all, what is exhibited as constituting one single work made from multiple parts includes, apart from paintings in different sizes and following different aesthetic orientations, drawings done with pencil, charcoal, ink, etc., black and white photographs, a video film and a large scale architectural model – items of imagery relating to each other to form the work while displacing the means of representation. This multiplicity is framed by the premise that another artist’s work is at stake. The statement presented as an introduction to the exhibition reveals his biography in the briefest form – name, date of birth and death, last address, an irrevocable decision for self-imposed confinement in his house determining the second major period of his life and work. The note claims that the visitor of The Painter A. K. is confronted with that person’s work of a lifetime. It suggests that the painting (and additional work) of George Hadjimichalis exceeds an oeuvre’s individual approach by rendering the work of another painter, A. K., an invented figure, while there is no reason to doubt at any point that it is Hadjimichalis who produced that work. The installation subtitled A Novel is not a fiction. No effort is made to suspend disbelief. There is no intention to lead anyone to assume that it was someone other than Hadjimichalis who painted these paintings, who took these photographs, who filmed this video. Work, obviously made by George Hadjimichalis, introduced as A. K.’s lifework.
1:1 scale model of the walls and 1:2 scale model of the floor plan
