© Antonia Eggeling

The work of the Greek artist Apostolos Palavrakis (born 1962) is as diverse as the sources from which his artistic work derives. Through drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, his work explores human intellectual and cultural history as well as his own position in the web of social and political realities, while also addressing the ways in which physical reality manifests itself to us.

In his 25 years of collaborating with the gallery, Palavrakis has decisively developed his work, moving from the sensual, lyrical approach he pursued in the 1990s to a clear, formally almost austere objectivity, in which structure and form take precedence over expressive gesture and mythical aura. While in his early works, he explored spiritual themes, poetry, myth, the truth of words and imagery, these days his work focuses on the man-made environment. He deconstructs and reinterprets these environments through an engagement with architecture, technology, and science in order to consider social, political, and economic contexts in which human existence manifests itself today. However his search for what lies behind things, the system that permeates our experiential reality, remains unchanged.

Apostolos Palavrakis lives and works in Dortmund and Thessaloniki.