IN LOCO PARENTIS
Seven artists connect to their parents

24-31 ΜAY 2018, Romantso, Athens
One november evening, in Moscow, six artist friends met at the home of Maxim Illiukin and Natascha Strutchkova to share short presentations of their work. Eleni Mylonas showed a video she had just completed about her mother. The video was moving and powerful and at the end of the projection there was an outburst of enthusiastic clapping. Maxim then suggested that the six artists present including our friend Rafael Mahdavi, form a group of seven artists to revisit the legacy of their parents through their own work. It is interesting to note that some of the parents were artists themselves.
ARTISTS:

Euphrosyne Doxiadis was born in 1946. She is a painter, installation artist and author of the book: The Mysterious Fayum Portraits; Faces from Ancient Egypt. She has had exhibitions worldwide and put up installations in Athens, Spain and the USA.
www.euphrosynedoxiadis.com

Despina Flessa was born in Athens in 1986. She graduated from Athens School of Fine Arts, Painting Department in 2012. In 2010 she studied at Edinburgh College of Art at the Painting Department while been on an Erasmus scholarship. Between 2013 and 2015 she continued her postgraduate studies for the Master of Fine Arts at the Athens Fine Arts School. She had solo exhibitions of her work in Zoumboulakis Galleries in Athens (2016) and pop/off/art gallery in Moscow (2017) and has participated in many group exhibitions and art projects in Greece and abroad. She lives and works in Athens.
www.despinaflessa.com

Born in 1975 and lives in Moscow, Russia. Ilyukhin is an artist, who works at the intersection of various media and of institutions. Educated as engineer of robotics (MSTU, Moscow) and as artist (ICA Moscow), his interest lies in the creative interaction of technique and thought. In 2000 he co-founded the Art Business Consulting group (http://abc-group.ru) which focuses on visual and mental processes of the office habitat in their projects. Since 2004 he is the manager of his own artist-run gallery and laboratory which has organized sixty monthly shows of associated artists. In 2009 Ilyukhin was a project manager of an artist-run art fair Universam where twenty-five groups and more than hundred artists took part. Since 2011 he has developed the project OFIS which working on a times-share model with architects, and has organized some 20 exhibitions of different type and media. One of the experimental themes of the OFIS gallery the coexistence and close collaboration to diverse media and techniques. Hotel Moscow was his curating project in year 2013 (http://hotelmoscow.info). There were 21 artists from Moscow and Leipzig involved, and the exhibition space was a living space and place for developing art and communication. Maxim Ilyukhin also works on his personal artworks, shows, and performances.
http://abc-group.ru/i-max/MaximIlyukhin.pdf

Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi, painter, sculptor, stage designer, photographer, and author was born in 1946 and educated in Europe and America. Multinational, multicultural, and multilingual, he has had gallery and museum solo shows worldwide. He divides his time between France and Greece.
www.rafaelmahdavi.com

Born in Moscow in 1979. During 1990-97 he studied at the Moscow Academic Art Lyceum of Russian Federation. From1999-2004 he studied at the School of Theology in University of Athens (UOA) with the scholarship of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Hellenic Republic. From 2005-2009 he studied painting in Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA). In 2007-2008 he studied at Universidad de Sevilla, Facultad de Bellas Artes while been on an Erasmus scholarship. He has participated in many solo and group exhibitions and art projects in Greece and abroad. His works can be found in museums and private collections in Russia, Greece and other countries. He lives and works between Athens and Moscow.
http://masteropoulos.gr/biography

Born in Greece, Eleni Mylonas came to New York on a Fulbright grant and a scholarship from Columbia University. She received a Master's Degree in Journalism in 1967 and made New York her home. She later studied photography at the Polytechnic of Central London and was invited to show her work at the Royal Photographic Society. After traveling extensively in Europe, and north Africa she drove overland from London to Afghanistan and back in 1972. Returning to New York she completed a haunting series of large scale photographs "Journey Through Ellis Island" which was exhibited at PS1 in New York and at the Zoumboulakis Gallery in Athens. Three large scale prints from this series are now part of the permanent installation at the Ellis Island Museum. Represented for many years by the Ileana Tounta Gallery in Athens and Art Resources Transfer in New York, Mylonas soon moved from pure photography to sculpture, to geometric abstraction, to video and mixed media. Her work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the United States and is in many public and private collections. She has taught at Parson's school for Design /The New School in NY and given many talks on her work. She was part of "Modern Odysseys" a major review of Greek American Art at the Queen Museum of Art in New York and participated in the first Athens Biennale "Destroy Athens." Her multimedia installation "Virtual Conversations" was shown at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the 3rd Biennale of Thessaloniki in 2011. In 2014 she had a major solo show at the BENAKI MUSEUM in Athens titled "The Cursed Serpent and at the Francoise Heitsch Gallery in Munich, titled "The Town Crier." Mylonas maintains a Studio in New York and Athens and continues to travel frequently.
www.elenimylonasart.com

Natasha Struchkova was born in Moscow in 1968. She graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture in 1993. Struchkova became one of the first Russian web-designers. Her first creative projects in the late 90’s were connected with the development of digital technologies - the Internet and virtual reality programming languages. In 1999-2000 she studied at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Graduates formed a group "Leto", in terms of which a festival of street performances took place in 2000-2002. In 2001 Natasha Struchkova, Maxim Ilyukhin and Mikhail Kosolapov founded ABC group (Art Business Consulting). The group focuses on the topic of office culture and the image of middle manager; participants create objects, installations, performances, photo and video, graphics and painting. In 2004-2009 group had their own artists-run space “ABC Gallery” at Art-Strelka, in 2010-2012 "Office Gallery" at ARTPLAY.
In 2001 Struchkova started working as a painter. In her paintings she comprehends how through information flows and modern technology the surrounding reality is formed. In 2001-2012 she creates a "pixel" painting, simulating computer graphics from the 90’s. The plot is based on the compilation of the popular media images. In 2009 Struchkova referred to the paintings of Russian artists: on her canvases she re-created recognizable scenes and landscapes using LEGO parts. The designer becomes a metaphor for a world in which all the materials and items were replaced by universal plastic parts. Struchkova makes sketches in graphics programs: she generates dimensional spatial compositions and chooses perspectives for display on the canvas. Converting kilobytes into the art and using at the basis of the image now pixels, then the three-dimensional model, Struchkova registers, according to her own words, a strange state of matter: neither live nor dead.
She is a repeated participant of Moscow Biennale (2005, 2007, 2011, 2013). Her works have been exhibited numerous times at the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Hermitage Museum (Saint-Petersburg), the Garage Centre for Contemporary Art (Moscow), the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima, Japan), the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead, UK), the Pinchuck Art Centre (Kiev, Ukraine). Struchkova’ s works are in the collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art as well as in the numerous private collections. The artist’s first solo exhibition FUTURUSSIA took place at Regina Gallery in 2004.
https://www.struchkovanatasha.com

Music jam at closing party

With Domenicos and his music instruments, Georgus and his flute, Kostas, Eva, Max and Nicky's dzuras.

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