Dorra, Djibouti Print

Apostolia Vorgianiti was born in Athens, Greece. She started taking drawing and painting lessons at a very young age. She then studied drama before moving to the UK and completing her BA in Art at the University of East London in 2009. There she also discovered her passion for scenography, and was encouraged to continue her studies in painting. Her early oil paintings, influenced by drama and theatre, were concerned with the human figure and the Jungian notion of the ‘shadow’ as a psychic content. Since then, she has been working on private commissions and extending her paintings, materially and conceptually. In the last two years Apostolia has been working on a series of paintings through which she has been exploring the earth’s abstractions and the relationship between, what Deleuze and Guattari called ‘smooth and striated’ space, with a particular reference to the African land. Using satellite imagery as a starting point, she creates paintings that reveal the diversity of the landscape and its conflicting structures.. Her paintings focus on abstractions, geometric shapes, colours, patterns and textures, which she reproduces using diverse mediums and tools, such as sponges and cloths. Her interest in the satellite imagery lies with human interference and the imposition of limits on nature, which result to grids and changes on the form of the land. Her approach is influenced by Edward Burtynsky’s photography, and current environmental and cultural concerns. It has also been influenced by scientific methods of recording and representing the earth’s surface, as well as her ongoing preoccupation and experimentation with diverse material.