On Thursday 2nd of October, in the art space of 'Astrolavos Dexameni' (Xanthippou 11, Kolonaki, tel: 210 7294342,3, fax: 210 7293317, opening hours: Tu-Fr 10.30-14.00 & 18.00-21.00, Sat 10.30-14.30) open two painting exhibitions. The painting work of Maria Maroudi (lower gallery level) entitled: 'Backward Progress' and the painting and artistic manufactures work by Margarita Petrova (middle gallery level) entitled: 'House - Webs'.

Maria Maroudi, continuing her artistic course and quests, as far as the materials she uses are concerned, returns in the 2 -dimensions and the canvass as her base, in this unit of work emphases mixed medium techniques and the creative mixing of paper, newspaper, cloth, etc. One could argue that the importance of materials is dominant in these works, mainly the way with which large surfaces of curved, wrinkled or torned materials are intergraded in her compositions; this idea is totally coincided with the exhibitions mainframe idea and seems to be evident in each and every artwork.

'Backward Progress', or in a free translation 'Accomplice in a Backward Route' is indicative of the sharp critic made by the artist against the social happenings of our time. Once an accomplice, today unable to react against a course of a society, which even though it seems to be looking ahead, it is most certainly going backwards. A society that keeps a conservative attitude towards its ideas and visions, so suspicious that averts each and every essential reaction born within this gloomy reality. Alienated, detached from its environment, greedy, indifferent and self-destructive.

Large, engraved, torn and spoiled by usage and time surfaces and the successive newspaper layers refuting one another compose a dim scenery, colorless, vague, indistinct, almost neutral. Walls from which positions and feelings, colors, imagination and humor have been long lost.

Words without meaning, like black marks on an apathetic background. Flowers, readymade stamped motives on cloths and papers, free of their decorative character; imprint mans disturbed relationship with nature, where fake is so beautiful that looks real and vice versa. Children's figures sketched with charcoal, pencil, acrylic colors, ill-timed figures, old fashioned and a bit mellow, yet happy, reminiscing a lost (if ever existing) innocence and expressing hope for the future.

Maria Maroudi by using these simple materials, through the game of color technique, tensions, antithesis and harmony that coexist in her work, in an atmosphere of total deterioration and with the sense of melancholic nostalgia, calm yet determined, composes her 'harsh critic' for now while projecting her hopes for a better future through retrospection and with reference to the achievements of the past.

Margarita Petrova, during the same period of time exhibits in the middle gallery level her new work entitled: 'House Webs', on which the artist artistically approaches the world of objects convinced that artifacts, endowed with passion are able to speak and have a life of their own.

What interests the artist is an atmospheric approach of those parts where objects 'escape' their usage value thus acquiring, through the artist's intervention, a whole new identity.

The artist's main purpose is the foiling of every operational use of the objects character and their exaltation into aesthetic objects, into works of art.

The objects Petrova uses; old furniture, tables, chairs but also frames, pillows, embroidery canvasses, are objects used to decorate former decades urban households, however, the artist connects them with disparate materials such as plastic lawn, buttons, nylons, threads, feathers and laces.

Through her works-manufactures, the artist wishes to attribute a conflicting sense of 'homely warmth' and mystery, while negotiating ideas of limits, safeguarding and confinement.

Through this work of hers Margarita Petrova, sets her personal limits in comparison with the very society she lives in and her female nature, while inviting the viewer to interpret according ones experiences and identity.

Duration of exhibition: until Saturday 1st of November 2008