Installations: A Retrospective of Exhibitions
ECHO | ΗΧΩ, 2024
Aristomenis Theodoropoulos presented ECHO at The Project Gallery in Athens, Greece, in May 2024. The exhibition featured 18 paintings on canvas and a self-composed soundscape, curated by Foteini Vergidou. The title references the ancient Greek myth of Echo, exploring themes of musicality, seduction, and repetition.
Theodoropoulos connects ancient and contemporary ruins, fictional realism, and paganism. Bold colors and black-and-white forms create an aesthetic experience, while figures in the paintings vaguely suggest mythological creatures and deities, in tune with two-dimensional environments.
The exhibition also engages with the idea of mysterious relics from distant civilizations whose meaning often remains speculative.
TOPOS, 2023
In June 2023, Aristomenis Theodoropoulos presented his first collaborative artistic project, TOPOS, in partnership with the fashion brand 2WO+1NE=2 at Teras Athens. The exhibition featured three abstract paintings by Theodoropoulos, envisioned as landscapes encouraging viewers to imagine their own settings and stories. These paintings inspired a capsule collection of high-fashion garments by 2WO+1NE=2, with each piece translating elements of the artwork into wearable art.
True to the brand’s practice of grounding each collection in the culture, traditions, and geography of a specific global region, the installation offered an immersive exploration of place and meaning. Theodoropoulos enhanced the experience with a live performance held daily throughout the exhibition’s duration, combining his paintings, garments, and soundscapes to create a fully integrated artistic environment.
The abstract landscapes depicted ambiguous, dreamlike “places” open to interpretation, while the garments embodied these themes as forms of moving art. Together, the works, collection, and performances created a multi-sensory narrative that blurred the lines between painting, fashion, and performance.
OUT | ΕΞΩ, 2021
In October 2021, Aristomenis Theodoropoulos presented OUT (ΕΞΩ) at the Mets Art Center in Athens, his third solo exhibition and a pivotal moment in his artistic journey. The show featured 11 large-scale oil paintings—the first to showcase his distinctive black paint technique, which he would continue developing in the years to come. These works emerged during the 2020-2021 lockdowns, reflecting themes of isolation and transition, captured through enigmatic, atmospheric landscapes.
The exhibition included a central installation: a sculptural composition of charcoal and wood remnants collected from the Attica wildfires, symbolically placed in the heart of the gallery. Complemented by an original ambient soundtrack composed by the artist, the installation amplified the emotional resonance of the works, inviting viewers to experience a profound state of liminality.
Curated by Foteini Vergidou, OUT (ΕΞΩ) examined the unseen and intermediate states between beginnings and endings, encouraging personal narratives and interpretations of isolation and resilience.
Before Echo | Πριν την Ηχώ, 2019
In May 2019, Aristomenis Theodoropoulos presented Before Echo (Πριν την Ηχώ) at the Boiler Project Space, housed in a vacant neoclassical building in Athens that had stood silent for decades. The exhibition featured 23 small-scale diptychs created with black acrylic on paper, released as a limited-edition artist book. Through a fusion of automatic writing and drawing, Theodoropoulos’s first engagement with the myth of Echo reverberated across his later work.
The choice of the building held symbolic weight, reflecting the themes of time, heritage, and the cyclical nature of experience. Echo—whether referencing the mythological figure, the natural occurrence, or the very concept of repetition—resonates with themes of beginning and end, chaos and order. The fleeting nature of the echo, the return of sound after its initial creation, symbolized a sense of past and present colliding. Together with the ambient soundtrack, the space’s physical decay and temporal distance enhanced the works’ exploration of the ephemeral, urging the viewer to consider the echoes of time, the continuity of existence, and the resonating impact of past events on the present.
HERE | ΕΔΩ, 2018
In October 2018, Aristomenis Theodoropoulos presented HERE (ΕΔΩ), his debut solo exhibition at the short-lived Fotagogoi Project Space, an ex-industrial building in Athens.
This show featured seven paintings, each conceptually linked to a corresponding song, bridging the materiality of visual art with the immateriality of sound.
As a pivotal moment in Theodoropoulos’s artistic journey, HERE marked a departure from his figurative work, introducing early themes of abstraction—distorted figures, vague settings, and symbolic representations.
The exhibition was accompanied by a limited edition vinyl release, ΦΕΥ (FEF), which showcased the paintings in a published format and served as the exhibition’s soundtrack. This marked Theodoropoulos’s first integration of music into his art, merging two mediums and inviting the viewer to experience the paintings and sound as an interdependent whole.
