About
Alexandros Abazoglu’s practice is based on complex combinations of techniques, primarily painting, collage and screenprinting but also drawing with oil pastels, colored pencils, and graphite. His fragile canvases and paper-cut forms—objects from magazines, newspapers, advertising and political brochures, flyers (trikakia), fanzines, posters, as well as fragments from his previous paintings—are reactivated as "building materials" and coexist in hybrid structures, gaining a second life.
The uncanny and paradoxically unexpected compositions, executed with almost mechanical precision in their cutting, refer to a fascinating scenography of the world, where the artist directs his own vulnerable, enigmatic "props". In these compositions, organized mainly on white but also black backgrounds, space functions as an active agent of meaning. The lines, delicate and functional, create space and sometimes his beloved conceptual "showcases"—small Cabinets of Curiosities—where his, alluring objects accumulate.
These delicate and fragile objects, function as condensations of conceptualization and critical commentary: chess pieces and kings, hearts on porcelain plates, planets and spaceships, detached from their original context, are deconstructed and reintegrated into new microcosms, where they acquire political and social undertones. Childhood memory, the gesture of cutting, and the repetition of the process are transformed into mechanisms of reflection and self-observation.
Their paradoxical juxtapositions, produce a result that moves between the irrational and the everyday. The absurd is organically incorporated into the world of his work, revealing its deep integration into contemporary reality. Each piece contains a world that breaks, collapses, is recomposed, and reborn. Technical and organic, technology and body, internal and external gaze—everything merges. Dystopia and intimacy breathe together.
This visual universe, within the framework of a contemporary magic realism, establishes a fragile balance: materiality meets the imaginary, and the visible intertwines with the artist's internal gaze. The tension shifts from image to language and from form to meaning.
The themes extend to issues of biopolitics and anarcho-ecology, water, smog, masks, and the deposition(dethroning) of absolute human dominance. The obsession with form, color, and composition functions aesthetically at a primary level, while at a secondary level, it acquires political and social conceptualization. It is not an overtly declarative political art, but a subcutaneous, multi-layered critique organized through an invisible conceptual thread.
Space is often structured through architectural references and constructions, while recurring motifs of eyes and observation mechanisms refer to practices of surveillance and control. Mythology and references to ancient Greek culture are deconstructed and recomposed into hybrid, fragmented objects that become carriers of political significance. Faceless figures, without a clear identity, comment on biopolitical power, the dominance of the capitalist system, and civilization as a potential source of misery.
The work articulates a reflection and a form of defense against an unstable, precarious, and controlled world as well as the vulnerability of the contemporary subject. At the same time, it makes visible the contradictions, ambiguities, and cracks through which a critical consciousness can develop. It constitutes a space for the coexistence of heterogeneous elements, where the viewer is invited to move between different fields of visibility and meaning. It is a dynamic site of critique and social mediation that offers no answers, but alternative ways of understanding reality.
Through his fragmentary, silent, uncanny, and familiar objects, Alexandros Abazoglu—with a tender negotiation of the harshness of contemporary human condition—formulates an open question about the possibility of escape, transformation and the re-signification of life today, not as a certainty, but as an ongoing process of searching. "Is There Any Way Out?" sets a question that remains open. Within it, everything breathes differently, just as we do, within the uncertain responsibility of existing. His work unfolds with its own personal rhythmology, like a ceaseless heartbeat within the body of the world.
Maria Vasiliki Kenanidou
Art Historian and Critic
Artist Bio:
Alexandros Abazoglu was born in Thessaloniki in 1993. He completed his undergraduate studies at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Western Macedonia(UOWM) and earned his M.F.A. from the Mount Royal School of Art of the Maryland Institute College of Art(MICA), in Baltimore, USA.
To support his graduate studies, he was awarded several scholarships from both Greek and American institutions, including The Morris Louis Art Trust and the NEON Foundation. During the pandemic, he commenced his doctoral research in fields such as Aesthetics and Socio-political Philosophy, under the supervision of Professor Y. Ziogas, alongside F. DeBrabander and M. Harris from U.S.-based universities.
Prior to his current show, he has held three solo exhibitions in Greece and the U.S.A., and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and artist residencies both in Greece and abroad. Throughout his graduate studies, he served as a Teaching Assistant for undergraduate courses and to this day, he continues to teach periodically as a PhD candidate, within the undergraduate and postgraduate programs of the School of Fine Arts(UOWM).