User:Polikosasteras1/Martha Dimitropoulou

Martha Dimitropoulou is a greek artist. She was born in Athens in 1972 and from 1991 to 1997 she studied painting at the ASFA. Then, she continued with postgraduate studies of sculpture at the Royal College of Art (1998-2000) and received a PhD from the University of East London on a Greek state scholarship (2000-2006).

Her main source of inspiration from the outset, was nature and especially the world of plants. She often uses natural and intact materials. In her second solo exhibition Splash (Ileana Tounta Centre for Contemporary Art, 2006) she created an interactive relationship between the urban and the natural world, with digitally generated weeds and pests spreading on the floor and climbing the walls of the room. Dimitropoulou attempted to propose a reading of natural world forms and at the same time to comment on aesthetic values which the naturalist illusion has overlooked, by selecting what is probably the basest link in the biological chain. In 2008, in the group exhibition The Island (Cosmos of Culture, Athens) she presents her first work with pine needles, a material which has since become a fixture in her art as she experiments with their strength and density in life-size works. She often uses this humble material to reproduce objects-symbols of wealth and power, creating an oxymoron, as in her solo exhibition Mercedes S500 (Ileana Tounta Centre for Contemporary Art, 2013). She has had solo exhibitions in Athens and Rhodes and has taken part in dozens of group shows in Greece and abroad, including: Young Artists' Biennale (Rome, 1999), Assembly (London, 2000), Arcadia in the City (London, 2002), Unfair 2007 (Athens & Thessaloniki 2007), Plain View (National Theatre, Athens 2011), Devalue.