Ioanna Limniou transforms The Breeder gallery into an ideal garden

“Though as a ghost, I shall lightly tread, the summer fields”. This haiku of his Hokusai gives the title to the first solo exhibition of IOannas Limniou in the gallery The Breederstarting on April 25th and running through May 25th.

This time the gallery has been transformed through its fantastic colorful landscapes into a spiritual and ideal garden. Like a ghost the human presence, the imperceptible movement of the almost invisible man, makes the flowery land and gardens flicker in the light, revealing a first kiss in the park, a cyclist crossing a field of enormous flowers, figures emerging or hiding in leaves cold and warm that burn your eyes, next to a child’s game of transformation, the custom of her camel Thrace.

These forgotten figures of modern man in nature, walking inelegantly while no one notices him, observing himself around him or lost in his thoughts, project like a hint of a life that is lost and haunts only our memories and senses throughout work of Ioanna Limniou.

“When I go to London,” he says, showing a series of drawings he made there, “I hardly see the city. I sit in the parks, the people walking in there look vulnerable, they are surrounded by a purity, you don’t know where they are going and what they are thinking.

As you approach her images, the layers unfold, impatient travelers and apple growers, the top of the lighthouse of Alexandroupolis, her birthplace, and the joy of discovering, with hesitant steps, a heavenly world arrives like a wave.

“Having a strong experience of the countryside, her contact with folk painting and agricultural practices lends an almost spiritual quality to her work. The melancholy that dominates her painting acts as a threshold between past, present and future, giving the sense of an eternal space and time” says exhibition curator Odette Cuzou.

Ioanna was born in Alexandroupoli, grew up in Germany, where she stayed until she was seven years old. She remembers a very large tree, a willow, in her schoolyard. It was the place she liked to sit and that feeling follows her to this day. Her other favorite moment from Germany was going with the woman who looked after her to pick tomatoes in a field, cut poppies and make a world dressed in red.

“Very recently I discovered how much these memories have influenced me in my work as well,” he says.

When she returned to Alexandroupolis, where she stayed until she was 18, as an only child she had refuge in her notebooks and nature. “My grandfather was a beekeeper, a carpenter, a craftsman, my grandmother one of those goldsmith women, born of an agricultural culture that is disappearing today. I still remember the smell of the sedge and the wood, picking radishes and oregano.” This natural life became her dowry, she looks at it without nostalgia and uses it to express herself, however as a teenager she did nothing but look for ways to leave the periphery.

“I drew princesses and cats because they were the only ones who could run away from home at any moment,” she says. “Reading myself today, that’s what I wanted, to leave, I had the feeling that I would succeed. I didn’t know anything, I said I would become an architect or I would go to Ioannina in the department Visual Arts. But in Alexandroupolis we did graffiti, we had painted the whole city, there I realized for the first time that I feel good in colors, in the spontaneous moment of expression, and that’s how the idea that I should deal with artistic things began. Painting I had only seen from books, but I remember how eagerly I looked forward to it “Carpe Diem”the magazine for graffiti art, let’s see what is happening in Athens. No professor told me “go to Fine Arts”, maybe no one knew, I wish today they at least know to encourage all the children who have talent and concerns”.

Ioanna came to Athens for the first time at the age of 15, in 2000, to receive a painting prize as a student. When he arrived at the Syntagma, he saw the Fine Arts students protesting in Ermou, under a banner by Stelios Faitakis that read “Fine Arts resists” and had an artist lying on the ground painted. “I saw this in Athens,” he says, “just as I saw a city painted and thought that this is true, people in the city do it. I was speechless.”

After all, her path did not start from the Fine Arts School but from a fashion design school that was complemented by a “career” as a waitress and barman. “I did the classics for a living, I went to Tinos for a season and there I started painting again, I said no to everything else. I decided to do art conservation at a public IEK in Ilioupoli, there I met Anna Papastamou, who saw my fluency in color and while we were conserving an image she told me “go to Fine Arts, try it” and that’s how my hesitations disappeared” .

Ioanna finally landed on the planet of “Fine Arts” in 2016 and stayed all the years in the workshop of Aristotle Tzakos. “For me he was a very strong figure, he was a mentor, we worked hard and that’s how the need was born and I started to make my own glossary as well. While I was at school I also worked as a maintenance worker in the Metropolis of Athens and we painted with a group on the street, shops, I also did a mural in a bar in Exarchia”.

In her works she likes to tell stories in which man and space are equal. In the dense vegetation, there is also a glimmer of hope that we deserve a better reality than the one we live in the suffocatingly built cities, like an escape to a world where you hear the gurgling of water and the chirping of birds. Here there is the sense of carelessness of people dreaming of falling in love, the victory of nature over the urban landscape, the element of transformation that lurks, the undefined fluidity that gives birth to ever new images in our imagination.

“When I go to London,” he says, showing a series of drawings he made there, “I hardly see the city. I sit in the parks, the people walking in there look vulnerable, they are surrounded by a purity, you don’t know where they are going and what they are thinking. This is what I would like for a viewer of my work to create their own story. I go on and on – I don’t remember myself doing anything else – observing my surroundings as a source of inspiration and as a connecting link, living in the city and in the laboratory and being able to escape into nature to feel it and returning to I imagine her.”

Ioanna Limniou – Though as a ghost, I shall lightly tread, the summer fields
The Breeder (45 Iasonos, 210 3317527)
Opening: Thursday 25/4, 19:00-21:00
Exhibition duration: 25/4-25/5
Editor: Odette Cuzou

The article was published in LIFO print