PETROS MORIS. Copies and Columns

Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 6 - 9pm

In his first solo show at DUVE Berlin, Athens-based artist Petros Moris presents an installation of wall-based and sculptural works that bring together practices of industrial, digital and manual production, in order to reflect on the historical and material layers that compose the techno-cultural strata of the contemporary human-built environment.

Being the first element of the show, Copies constitutes a series of digital prints on sheets of rubber flooring insulation that use as their primary visual material a selection of ancient mosaic pavements that extend across the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine eras, while originating from different cities built around the Mediterranean. These mosaic compositions are manually traced tile-by-tile with the usage of CAD software, rendering an abstract synthesis of digitally-designed tile wireframes. This laborious tracing process eventually strips away representational elements such as colors and tones from the original mosaics’ subjects, which span from decorative, animal and plant motives, to mythological and folklore scenes. Revealing the bare structure of the diverse tessellation techniques assigned to their respective initial compositions, these black rectangular wall pieces present themselves as hybrids between archeological presentation boards, architectural software interfaces and non-functional building elements. Scattered areas covered with actual marble tiles act as parasitical samples that force themselves onto these fragmented geometrical landscapes. They eventually refer back to the material and labour-related aspects attributed to the selected ancient artifacts. 

Operating in dialogue with Copies, the sculptural installation Columns consists of seven different typologies of steel cages, namely pre-made metallic constructions of reinforcing steel. Systematically arranged in rows, the two meter-long metallic forms of various diameters compose a scenery resembling an idle construction site: a place in a state of wreckage or, alternatively, a place to-become.  

In Copies and Columns Moris employs archeological and preservation analogies in combination with constructional and decorative practices in order to produce a system of spatial and conceptual subversion. The third part of the show, a text written by the artist, is dispersed around the wall pieces as unexpected supporting elements that fill up the ruined empty areas of the wireframe mosaic compositions. Both theoretic and poetic in character, the text traces the movement from the intimate scale of manual gesture to the ones of natural entropic processes and tectonic production by way of an idiosyncratic kaleidoscopic logic.  

Petros Moris was born in 1986 in Lamia, Greece. He completed his studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts and obtained an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture at the University of Thessaly, Greece. Moris has exhibited his work in solo shows at Project Native Informant, London (2013), OMMU Distribution, Athens (2011) and Kappatos Gallery, Athens (2010). As one of the founders of the the art collective KERNEL, he has presented work in solo exhibitions at SPACE, London (2013) and XYZ Outlet, Athens (2011). He has curated projects for the Athens Biennial and the London-based project space Woodmill, as well as for the Whitechapel Gallery and the Chisenhale Gallery in London (as part of the SIM collective). Moris is the founder of Athens-based publishing and curatorial project Radical Reading.