Apple
Painted bronze — black metallic
Visual Artist & Sculptor — Athens, 1960
VASSILIKI
Worlds you can walk through — monumental kinetic installations, sculpture & painting.
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Visual Artist & Sculptor — Athens, 1960
Worlds you can walk through — monumental kinetic installations, sculpture & painting.
For four decades the Athens-born artist Vassiliki Benopoulou has turned public squares into immersive environments — cities of crosses, harlequin figures, checkerboard spheres. She names her art Divinitas: the divine found not in religion but in the human intellect and psyche. Mentored by the critic Pierre Restany and the painter Nicolas Carone, she has become one of contemporary art's rare total artists.
The scale
2000 · Installation
Considered one of the largest installations ever made — two thousand hand-painted sculptures of Dancers, Acrobats, Guards and Harlequins, set in motion by swings, wheels and balls. The multi-coloured diamond costume of the Harlequin, the tragic figure of the Commedia dell'Arte, became the artist's signature motif. Shown at Technopolis-Gazi in Athens, the Place de la Bastille in Paris, and Martigny in Switzerland.
2000–2004 · The largest 3-D painting in contemporary art
A hand-painted canvas of rhombuses that can expand to cover 2,000 square metres — four years of work by the artist and four assistants. Visitors remove their shoes and walk upon the painting; through the brain's own stimuli the diamonds are never quite perceived the same way twice, a game of dizziness and "hypnotism" at the centre of The City of Games.
1995 · Installation
Five hundred crosses of iron and broken mirror — a maze of reflection exhibited across Europe, joining the earthly microcosm of man to the macrocosm of the universe. When the work provoked fanatical reaction and censorship in Athens, the critic Pierre Restany appealed to the Greek Parliament and the international press, defending her right to "the most humanist symbol of mankind."
Everything, painted by hand
Painted bronze — black metallic
Sculpture
Sculpture · black
Installation
Ceramic — coloured
Ceramic
Ceramic
Painted bronze
Sculpture
“Ms Vassiliki uses the cross as the basic element of her art… In Athens they deny her the use of the most humanist symbol of mankind — a surprising narrowness of mind in a land which pretends to have invented democracy.”
Pierre RestanyArt critic · Paris, 1998
“Vassiliki conjugates the contemplative space of a Rothko with the benevolent lyricism of a Sonia Delaunay… With unparalleled generosity she opens to us the realm of the dream.”
Eurydice Trichon-MilsaniArt historian, AICA · 2004
“Vassiliki remains one of the few artists to carry out a perpetual struggle against the entropy of the meaning of our world.”
Damien SaussetCritic · ‘The Gift of Grace’, 2004
The City of Games · Place de la Bastille, Paris
In 2000 the municipality of Paris invited the work to the Place de la Bastille — a visitor record, and worldwide publicity.
Biography
An interdisciplinary mind, from literature and philosophy to monumental sculpture.
Born in Athens in 1960, Vassiliki studied literature, then painting and sculpture with Nicolas Carone in Italy. Her first creative period (1976–1996) is governed by a philosophy she calls Divinitas — the divine within human nature. From the cross-shaped figures of the 1990s to The City of Games, Being Together and I Believe, her work forms one continuous polyptych on man and the divine.
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Forty solo exhibitions since 1982, across Greece, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, the U.S.A. and Japan.