Helen Kyrkilis is a Greek-Canadian artist who lives and works in Athens, Greece. She studied Painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts and obtained her MFA with honors in 2017.The range of her work includes paintings, collages and sculptures. Frequently, various materials and objects are incorporated into her paintings threads, wood, textiles, embroidery, picture frames and more, thus broadening the conventional two dimensional bounds of painting.The wild and impulsive gestural strokes seen on her paintings convey the inner source of her creativity. Her work is a result of a life time of influences, of personal and collective memories, all carrying an emotional value. She forces a reflection on not only memory and history, but what potential can be found in bringing the past into a new encounter with the present. Through curiosity and constant experimentation, with influences from Arte Povera, Dada even Pop Art, Helen Kyrkilis examines what is beyond the given meaning of things. Using ludicrous or unorthodox materials that talk not only operatively but also artfully, she focuses on highlighting each other's relationships with humor and imagination.The color symphony, the schematic fit or even the conversation of materials creates the visual stimulus and makes the project components interact, resulting in their conceptual and formal integration.At the same time, the main topic of her works is the collecting. A choice conscious and yet unconscious, sometimes intuitively and sometimes synergistically. Readymade objects that change shape and identity according to their placement and as if they were pieces of a puzzle, create a visual riddle that seeks to be solved. It is a generous result of images and meanings summarized as “modern baroque”.She has participated in several group exhibitions and in 2020 she had her first solo exhibition at Evripides Art Gallery and in 2023 the second.Her works are found in the collection of Piraeus Bank and in private art collections in Greece and abroad.
