The Closer You Are...

Lilia

February 4-24, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday, February 4th, 6-8 PM

Curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos, Exhibitions Director

Lilia is a conceptual artist and sculptor who lives, and works, in New York City. She produces sculptures and multi-media works including video, projections, photographs, and 3-dimensional pieces in marble, cement, and plaster.

Her approach is lyrical and suggestive rather than realistic or descriptive. Lilia's forms can be read as lifelike shapes alluding, through their shape, to body parts. Lilia's philosophies resonate with Hippocrates words who said "Life is short, the Art long." These words are pure agony for the artist who tries to find timelessness in her subjects. Realizing that long after she's gone her works will live on she finds comfort in the words of another fellow Greek the poet Seferis who wrote "And yet the statues... become light with a human weight. You don't forget it."

The Closer You Are... is Lilia's latest multi-media series that also explores and expresses the softness or hardness of surface evident in the shape of the body. Her sculptures are carved of marble or cast and molded in plaster or cement to suggest the human anatomy. Her black and white photographs and projections are based on her sculptural production but photography makes it possible for her to isolate and focus more easily, on targeted elements such as the crevice or curve. The video is based on a plaster sculpture and an echocardiogram of the artist's heart. Lilia claims that this medium enables her to transform the sculpture by adding movement and sound in order to express the ever-changing nature of bodily sensations.

Lilia has studied at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography in New York and has shown locally at the Chelsea Museum of Art, the National Arts Club, The Sidney Mishkin Gallery, The Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, The Consulate General of Greece in New York, but also at the 4 Walls Gallery in Seoul and at Geochang, South Korea where she produced a public art project in granite.