Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce, Your Tears Will Dry, a solo exhibition of new works by Kiriakos Tompolidis. The paintings included in this exhibition are deeply influenced by Tompolidis’ recent move to Mexico City from Berlin, incorporating the color palette, visual sensibilities, and the endemic flora and fauna of his new environment into meticulous portrayals of memories and emotional states. Much of his practice grapples with his perception of being in between cultures and places, articulating both the parallels and fissures between his adopted home and his native country of Greece. The paintings depict subjects who seem to vacillate between feelings of displacement and familiarity, fragility and resolve, with a granular attention given to the patinas and patterns of their surroundings.
In the painting Under the Bougainvillea, a young version of Tompolidis stands in front of an ornately patterned doorway, a vivid fuchsia Bougainvillea cascading over the architecture while stray cats lounge nearby. Like in many of his paintings, photo transfers and other artifacts are seamlessly integrated into the composition – Bougainvillea leaves from Greece are delicately woven in among the petals, and the tactility of the floor tiles is enhanced with collaged elements. The diptych acts as a bridge between disparate times and locations, exposing the surprising similarities between the plants, animals, and vernacular architecture of the artist’s childhood memories of Greece with his more recent experiences in Mexico City and Los Angeles.
Tompolidis’ paintings occupy an ambiguous and atemporal space that draws from family histories, lived experience, and dreams, and that is made tangible through intricately rendered textures and surface treatments. Patterns in textiles, architecture, and nature function as signifiers of place, time, and cultural context. In the work Her Reflection Tompolidis depicts his grandmother as a young woman, capturing her pensive smile in the mirror of her vanity and the small cross necklace and family portrait sitting atop her dresser. The artist’s grandmother reappears in the titular work Your Tears Will Dry, a trompe l’oeil painting of the back of a canvas inscribed with the phrase she often repeated, and which was formative in his understanding of perseverance. Some of the paintings present an unvarnished realism while others teeter into the surreal, so that collectively they offer a richly detailed view of a space between reality and recollection.
