Artist: Kalliopi Lemos

Gazelli Art House presents A Tide of Roses, a solo exhibition by Greek artist Kalliopi Lemos. Spanning nearly three decades, the show brings together new paintings and key sculptural works, exploring personal memories, myth, and the female body over the passing of time. Following this exhibition, Lemos will participate in Joy Like Time at the Sainsbury Centre this June with her series Ritual Garments (2020–22).

Natural floral forms underpin Lemos’ recent paintings. Working from her photographic studies of rose petals, the artist moves beyond still-life toward a fluid visual language of rolling, rhythmic forms. These works echo Lemos’ earliest piece in the exhibition, After War and Peace (1997), inspired by Rubens’ Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (1629–30), where Lemos absorbed feeling rather than composition. Similarly, the rose petals serve as a starting point rather than a destination.

Contrasts between abstraction and figuration, softness and metal, run through the exhibition. In Sunset Glow and Sunset Hues (both 2025), small canvases of translucent petals are framed in robust mild steel, containing their fragility. The compositions, with their distinctive cropping, reflect Lemos’ study of Japanese Ikebana, where line and space provide energy.

Central to Lemos’ practice is the female experience, where toughness and vulnerability coexist. In Immersed in Memories (2025), flesh-toned palettes suggest sensuality and mortality, while Diving into Salt Water (2025) recalls joyful childhood memories with the artist’s father in Chios. Specific journeys become lenses through which to contemplate a journey through a life. Boats Carrying Hope (2025) extends these themes to migration in search of safety, using boats as symbols of displacement and endurance.

With familial ties to the Mediterranean region, Lemos has a deep connection to mythology from Ancient Greece, and this informs the artist’s sculptures as living narratives. Deer on Altar (2013) fuses Iphigenia with the deer intended to replace her, collapsing sacrifice and rescue, while its dark, mineral-like surface and the expression modelled on the artist’s mother connect myth to personal experience. Deity no.3 (2018), inspired by the poetry of Sappho, depicts a winged female form evoking the Harpy or Siren. The wax sculpture confronts mythological metaphors of female power as monstrous, holding elegance and threat in tension. Memory in Velvet (2012) is an irreverent take on sexuality. A large hand-sewn figure poised on springs with a long plait of hair, the work situates Lemos within a lineage that includes Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois, treating memory as embodied.

Across painting and sculpture, A Tide of Roses invites viewers to consider how personal and cultural narratives intersect, and how ancient storytelling and memory continue to shape contemporary experience.