Lara Stafilopati
Over the past years, Lara Stafilopati has forged a singular approach to abstraction that is grounded in the body and closely observed perceptions of the world around her.
With an idiosyncratic, non-conformist approach to painting, her works occupy an intuitive space that exists beyond the formation of recognisable images, ‘before spoken language’, ‘before memory’ and ‘before the obtrusiveness of objects’. The compositions reveal themselves to her during the painting process, creating in concert with her materials to produce works that are poised between chance and calculation.
In contrast to the rational principles of Minimalism and Conceptualism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, Lara’s paintings convey a palpable sense of self. Her art is like a diary. That is the method of her work.
She draws upon personal encounters, which become the triggers for fleeting, internal impulses that are recorded in paint. Her process is a direct rhythm involving the body, with finger marks, remaining as a visceral record of her presence in the work. The vivid colour palette often dwells in a similarly corporeal register of fleshy pinks, blood reds and deep blues.
Lara Stafilopatis’s expressive and visceral art is one of disclosure, dealing with personal experience and heightened states of emotion.
Frank and intimate but universal in its relevance, her work draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief, unravelling in the process the nuanced constructs of ‘woman’ and ‘self’ through probing self-exploration.
Likewise, her intricate, colourful, hand-appliquéd blankets combine scraps of different material to spell out hard-hitting statements. Titled with phrases such as ‘Refusing the fossilization of the past’ (2020), ‘Crossing the void’ (2021) or ‘Dissolving into nothing’ (2021), they collectively re-imagine the artist as a splintered persona, portrayed not just from her own perspective but from that of those around her too. Mining her own life for subject-matter, Lara determined that for her, art had to be intrinsically bound up with an inner life.
Lara Stafylopati studied Fine Arts at Boston University and Massachusetts College of Art. She went on to study Shipping in London (Shipping Trade and Transport, London Metropolitan University).
She has exhibited her work in Greece and abroad. She lives and works in Athens.
