8 Questions with Christina Michalopoulou

Christina Michalopoulou is a Greek artist, a contemporary painter living and working in Thessaloniki, Greece. Her mediums are acrylic paint or oil colors on large canvas surfaces. Christina Michalopoulou’s paintings are figurative, realistic human figures, and body parts in surrealistic environments. Christina often likes to bring realism, sometimes even photorealism, of her figures contrasting with an abstract, pop, or fictional background—a play of surrealism resemblance to a collage.

Christina Michalopoulou’s focus is emotional and affective as emerging in human bodies and faces. She is interested in desire, love, obsession, sadness and joy, claustrophobia and liberation, hell, and heavens. While painting using brushes and her fingers, Christina touches upon the body's form and how it shifts when dressed in different shading and light. The skin and how it carries its wounds and traumas, the way it scars from things physical and mental; she loves tracing the way the body recoils or spreads when touched, the way it flourishes or hides away when looked at.

www.christinamichalopoulou.com | @christina_michalopoulou_art

Christina Michalopoulou’s bodies are always dipped in the space of different texture: it could be angular and harsh, or soft and nebulous, but it still carries the causes for the body's posture. It gives clues and explains what is happening. The dialectic between body and space is the overarching bridge of her work. The spaces she paints might not be physical or figurative. They might be the space of the canvas. But they always give form to the body folded in them. Space and body embrace each other in seriousness or fun, concreteness, or abstraction.

Christina has a Bachelor's degree in Marketing (Kingston University London, 1999), has studied Architectural Drawing at Ergastiri School of Arts (worked under Mr. G.I.Christopoulos, Thessaloniki, 1993) and Drawing & Color Techniques at Psarakis School of Arts (Thessaloniki, 1990).

Original artworks can be seen at her studio, DEKA5/ENDEKA, in Thessaloniki. Furthermore, in International Exhibitions throughout Europe, personal collections and digitally on Saatchi Art, The Art Space, Artmajeur, Kunstmatrix, and Artpal.

INTERVIEW

How did you start making art?

I returned to painting after a long hiatus. I do remember myself painting when I was young, but that was it. After that, everything went to a pause. It would seem that I was gathering images and shapes during that time. I was building an unconscious archive that lived somewhere underneath my breath. They are all now pouring out, unstoppable, in acrylic and oil, in abstraction and hyperrealist figuration, and blossoming color. I started monochrome during the last six years of my life.

How do you define yourself as an artist?

During the last few years, I seem to become a very contradictory person, and so does my work as an artist. My paintings lately are in a constant battle between abstraction and photorealism. Creating figurative, photorealistic human figures and body parts, on the one hand, bringing them in total contradiction with hardcore contemporary abstraction on the other. Sometimes, I even choose to bring the realism of my figures in contrast with an abstract, pop, or fictional background. 

You have been noted as saying, “I am interested in desire, love, obsession, sadness and elation, claustrophobia and liberation, hells and heavens.” Can you tell our readers what experience of your life is reflected in your works of art?

I was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, in a family of unconventional combiners. My father is a surgeon and a painter, and my mother is a dentist and a piano player. My brother graduated from the law academy. He is a writer and artist. My whole childhood was a catenaccio of oil color tubes, books, and opera arias, as well as a great deal of drama, coming from a wild combination of explosive personalities and unconventional relationships around me. A personal collapse, ten years ago, a burst of panic and anxiety crisis, and the procedure I had to follow to get over it was the zero point that made me realize I had to express all these childhood memories, relationships, and experiences. It was then that painting became a psychotherapeutic procedure, my way to clearance and freedom.

What do you see as the strengths of your project, visually or conceptually?

My work is focused mainly on female existence. My recent series of work called “Selfie” presented fleshes out the imperfections of a body that has grown, a skin that bears the scars of time, and a movement that whispers one’s deepest desires. It presents in a “raw” way uncomfortable yet familiar truths about ourselves and our connection to our environment. 

Tell us about the colors on your palette and anything new you have been experimenting with.

For a long time, my palette looked like the 50 shades of nude. Skin tones mixing each other like bodies lying down on a canvas bed. My palette has recently dramatically changed, experimenting with black, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, and grey, taking me from the photorealistic approach of human bodies to the splashing bursts of abstraction.

There’s a lot of painting on the market these days. How do you differentiate yours from the rest? What do you feel makes your work unique and truly your own?

My work challenges the viewer to confront and doubt various preconceived ideas about beauty, desire, femininity, the human skin, and the movement of a body in space. 

Through my paintings, beauty gets hard, no longer immortalization of the human form in its impeccable beauty but a desperate flirtation with mortality.

Is there a piece you consider a “breakthrough” in your career? 

Many paintings have hunted me, changed me, made me confront truths about myself and inner fears like “Mamma,” “Selfie of a mastectomy,” or “Cocoon.” But, I think that “Hands,” my first painting made eight years ago, revealed the unspoken, until then, truth, that I had to leave everything behind to be an artist. It was a turning point. 

And what is your aim as an artist?

Lately, I am focusing on finding a way to create paintings that will help people feel good. I need to make something that will calm my soul, give me balance and peace of mind. There is too much hardness, too much violence, and too much isolation out there, especially under the COVID-19 circumstances. I feel a constant need to break away from this circle of misery and sadness and create artworks that will get the viewer to a better place.

They say if you could be anything but an artist, don’t be an artist. What career are you neglecting right now by being an artist?

Being an artist was a decision I got when I was 35, in a period that I felt strongly the need to make some serious changes in my life. Till then, I already had a satisfying career in Marketing and advertising agencies for 11 years and also had created a successful brand, “Happyrooms”, with handmade christening and newborn goods. I still maintain the love for my first “child’, “Happyrooms” I chose to combine it with my new love, painting, rather than neglect it, and till now, it works pleasantly. Happyrooms takes care of the child in me, and painting takes care of the adult in me. 

The art world is in such a crisis nowadays that I don’t know if many of us can neglect a parallel career.