Marita Pappa

The Opening Gallery is pleased to present The Poignancy of a Perpetual Spring, a solo exhibition of works by Marita Pappa curated by Sozita Goudouna, exploring ideas of memory, authenticity, and temporality in the ever-changing post-pandemic urban landscape of New York City.

In her latest work, Marita Pappa is creating a taxonomy of artificial flora that decorates the restaurants and their outdoor spaces around the city. The artist has been a ferocious walker her whole life, a practice that deeply shapes her artistic making. During her walks, she started noticing beautiful marigolds and flamboyant magnolias resisting high temperatures, thriving, sprawling, and towering all over New York, and became increasingly curious about the abundance of fake blossoms and plants around the city. Hardly indistinguishable from the real ones, these beautiful, ever so colorful artificial arrangements became very popular during the pandemic where the restaurant owners used them as a solution to dress up their dining sheds and a marketing tool to attract customers to their restaurants. A similar shift happened after the Great Recession where the faux flower industry sales skyrocketed. American anthropologist Margaret Mead in the New York Times 1964 article The Flowering Of Fake Flowers argues that the proliferation of artificial flowers both in the domestic and in the public sphere in post-war America is an attempt of people to circumvent nature and an effort to gain some sense of permanence.

Following the disappearance of most of these outdoor constructs due to the city's new measures and the use of these spaces as shelters by homeless people, the artist is questioning the nature of these arrangements beyond the decorative. In Pappa's work, one is asked to rethink their relationship to public space and to look at the overlooked in their everyday surroundings. In these floral arbors, there is an inherent tension that the artist is drawn to. Their artificial nature evokes a state of melancholy and at the same time, there is a sense of familiarity.

The poignancy of this perpetual spring, one that is slowly disappearing becomes a symbol of the city's resiliency but also a testament to the fiction of permanence offered by their materiality. In this series of works, artificial flowers become speculative objects, that we might need to think critically about their existing systems, their social and environmental consequences as well as their potential futures. If the desire to blend outdoor and indoor spaces and simulate nature is ultimately our inability to accept death, one might wonder what the future holds for our ever-changing society and the human condition. Can we make peace with the inconvenient truth that perhaps only in the temporal nature of real flowers, ones that fade and die, can we look and feel real?

Marita Pappa (b. 1988) is a Greek interdisciplinary artist primarily working in installations, where she interweaves contexts of poetry, politics and place through the use of sculpture, text, sound and image making. Drawing from the politics, history and identity of the places she inhabits, as well as her own experiences as a woman and artist parent, Pappa becomes a close observer of everyday life and urban landscapes exploring the relationship between the body, time and public space as well as reflect on conditions of rupture and survival. Employing a performative and instinctual approach, her art making is research based and deeply personal at once, often acquiring an interventional and site specific nature. She works with everyday and ephemeral materials in order to create temporary environments and events where she seeks to find the intimate in the political and the ambiguous terrain between private and public, aesthetic and politics. Her first interaction as a practising artist was the field of photography. After a decade of photographic career, she decided to expand her visual vocabulary and pursued a Fine Art Degree at Glasgow School of Art in 2020 where she was awarded a Schillizzi Foundation Scholarship. She obtained her Masters in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, UK in 2022 where she was the recipient of the Leverhulme Trust Arts Scholarship for full tuition for her studies and the NEON Foundation scholarship for two consecutive years. Her RCA graduation show Nacre was shortlisted for the Harlow Sculpture Town Artist in Residence 2022/2023 award. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, Greece, and Italy, most notably in Gallery 46, Whitechapel London, Standpoint Gallery, London (2022), Bitume Photo Festival Puglia, Italy (2015) where she was an artist in residence, Brighton Photo Biennial (2014), Mediterranean Photography Festival, Crete (2016) and Young Photographers Athens Photofestival (2012). She has delivered artist talks, workshops, and tutorials at the BA Sculpture University of Camberwell, BA Fine Art Creative Arts Farnham, UK, South Thames College, and in the Preparatory and Vocational School of Fine Arts of Panormos, Tinos, Greece. She is currently a Fulbright Visiting Artist in residence at Parsons Fine Art department at The New School to pursue her research on New York’s post pandemic public space.