Gallery of the Municipality of Athens

27 February – 17 April 2025

Opening: Thursday 27 February 2025, 19:00

The Municipality of Athens, through the Culture, Sports and Youth Organization of the Municipality of Athens (OPANDA), presents, from February 27 to 17 April 2025 at the Athens Municipal Gallery, the exhibition by Dimitris Merantzas entitled “The aesthetics of despair and desperation: Domestic Utilitarian Objects and Products of Intellectual Flexibility”, which is a special project, as combining sculpture with design, the works are inspired by the philosophy of “do it yourself” (DIY), promoting the idea of the artwork as a utilitarian object.

The artist transforms the Gallery into an alternative department store out of a dystopian future, subverting the role of the museum and the expectations of the viewer. This “Mad Max IKEA”, as he describes it, hosts 120 works presented as “housewares”, made from scraps and disparate materials. Tables, chairs, sofas, monks, beds, bookcases, lamps, bedside tables, wall mirrors and various utilitarian small objects make up a single installation, an atmospheric domestic environment that you are invited to navigate by drawing inspiration from the unique and original exhibits.

With the eloquent title “The aesthetics of despair and desperation: Domestic Utilitarian Objects and Products of Intellectual Flexibility,” the exhibition is a guide to creative living in times of emergency, economic crises, urban decay, war conflicts and personal impasses. Here manual labour is presented as a one-way street, as the only solution that can get you out of a tragic, painful and unpleasant reality. “Everything from scratch and with our own hands” is the motto of Meranza, who urges viewers to discover their artistic side and artists to redefine the meaning of manual practice. His exhibition is a hymn to inventive imagination, to ingenuity, to our hidden skills.

As complex as a portmanteau, it is an exhibition within an exhibition: a different kind of “house exhibition” as an experimental exhibition of contemporary art. The artist plays about ten different characters or types of artists, who here act as suppliers to the shop in which the handmade objects are sold. Meranza’s exhibition functions more as a group than as an individual exhibition. The artists we meet here are distinguished by their obsessions: one obsessively makes crosses, another makes “domestic candelabras” that function as totemic lamps, and others use posters from hairdressing salons to make religious images such as the “Martyr Madonna”, cases from windows and old doors, mailbags or mirrors. One character makes items that include screens and another has access to pallets and building renovation materials. There are also artists obsessed with wheeled structures and partially charred wood from burnt-out houses.

Acting as an orchestrator and bridge-builder of different aesthetic and heterogeneous materials, Merantzas celebrates reuse, diversity and variety. Play and enjoyment are also two concepts of primary importance. In such an exhibition, willingly or unwillingly, viewers enter into an exploratory mood, dimension or adventure, invited to trace the aesthetic and conceptual bridges between the works. The game of identifying the different artist-providers is a process that operates underground and offers the satisfaction of a detection, an exploration. The pleasure of the viewer is thus enhanced, but also the pleasure of the artist, who feels that he or she is participating in a liberating process.

Dimitris Merantzas was born in 1967 in Athens, where he lives and works.

In 1988 he graduated from the Lycurgos Stavrakos School of Cinema and Television as director of photography. In 1990 he received the Fantastic Film Award for directing the film “Portes” at the Short Film Festival of Drama.In 1992 he received a commendation from the Spyropoulos Foundation for his participation in the Young Painters Competition.In 1997 he is unanimously accepted as a member of the Greek Chamber of Fine Arts.

During the period 2017/8 he collaborated as a lecturer at the Economic University of Piraeus, in the postgraduate programme “Humanities and Sustainable Development”, with the course “The Real and the Fantastic in Art”. In 2022 he was awarded the first prize in the open art competition co-organized by Athens Voice and the Municipality of Athens, under the auspices of the “Greece 2021” Committee, on the occasion of the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution.

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The start of the production of the exhibition, during the period 2020-21, was supported by a grant from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.

The exhibition is curated by Christoforos Marinos.

We are proud and grateful to have had the opportunity to support artist Dimitris Merantzas, even in a small way. His work has been a thought-provoking journey—one that challenges, inspires, and lingers in the mind long after the first encounter. It has been a privilege to witness his artistic vision unfold, and we look forward to seeing where his creativity leads next.