Fires in the city, Image on matter and input

Rena Papaspyrou was born in 1938 in Athens. She studied painting and mosaic at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1958-1961). She left for Paris the same year to continue her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts (1961-1967). She taught at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 1993 until her retirement and was the first woman to be elected director of a workshop at the School (3rd Painting Workshop). In 2006 she was elected professor emeritus. In her work she exhaustively explored the possibilities of material and drawing. She used found and readymade materials (wood, sheet metal, asphalt, mosaic tiles), derived exclusively from the urban space - the "urban landscape", as she called it in 1980 - as well as the technique of walling, in order to highlight the various "episodes" that a surface bears on it, and the associative images - "images in matter" - that are generated when they are posed. Since the 1990s, he has created many installations and environments, especially large-scale ones, in this direction. She has presented her work in 25 solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad, most recently in 2003 at the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum. She has participated in more than one hundred and fifty group exhibitions and international events, of which the most notable are: Avanguardia e Sperimentazione (Venice, 1978), Europalia (Brussels, 1982), Biennale Sao Paulo (1983), Metamorphoses of Modern Art (Athens, 1992), Contemporary Greek Art - Desmos Archive, (Thessaloniki, 2000), One Person's Materialism is Another Person's Romanticism (Glasgow 2012), Exhibition-Tribute for the Desmos Art Gallery from the collection of the MMST, (Thessaloniki 2014), In the Beginning is the Word - Concepts-Images-Image-Painting (China, 2018) etc.