Ioanna Pantazopoulou (b.1984, Athens, Greece) and currently lives and works in New York. She received both her BA and MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, U.K. She creates sculptural monuments and immersive installations that aim to disrupt and challenge the habitual approach one takes to spaces and objects. Through the use of everyday objects and unusual materials, the artist explores the way in which waste is mutually proportionate to luxury and how both are dependent on economic wealth and excess production. The importance of knowing the origin of the materials she uses, their ‘story’; is for her a social, political and cultural curiosity.
Pantazopoulou builds, reconstructs and reinvents large quantities of surplus materials. Often, she employs cast-off materials such as, old-stock bikinis, clothes, vintage jackets, leather sandals, Moroccan rugs, ex voto charms, toilet paper, pasta, chewing gum, factory foam scraps, furniture, bricks, discontinued bank notes just to name a few...These objects, disposable or expired, assume a new life in the sculptures. Through the re-invention of rules, she creates new worlds. This disambiguation of commodities cross-examines the relationship between humanity and the current political state of material excess. She offers asymbolic sustainable solution by refusing to classify these objects as waste and instead enables them to metamorphose into ‘contemporary monuments’. Along with this reconfiguration, the sculptures extend and explore the subject’s position in space. Pantazopoulou welcomes her audience to discover a fairytale world, which offers new perspectives. When these sculptures are created in situ, the space becomes a vital component to the development of the work. The sculptures of Ioanna Pantazopoulou follow the principles of architecture without being trapped in them. They overturn the notion of experience and participation, they attempt–through unexpected collisions–to create new connections between the past and the present, of what is lost and found.
She has exhibited her work at The Stavros Niarchos Hall-Greek National Opera in Athens, Greece, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in MA, B.A.M. (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in Brooklyn NYC, SCAD Gutstein Gallery in Savannah GA, Culture Lab in West PalmBeach, SAFE Gallery in New York, JAG Projects in Hudson NY, Situations Gallery in New York, NADA Miami, Grand Union Gallery in Birmingham, U.K. , Primetime Gallery in New York, Alex Mylona-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece, HydraSchool Projects in Hydra, Greece, NEON Organization in Athens, Greece and many more. Her works are included in the permanent collections of Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection; D. Daskalopoulos Collection; Solomon R. Guggenheim and MCA Chicago.