About

Chrysa Kanari(b.2002) is a Cypriot artist currently based in London. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at Lancaster University in 2023 and completed a Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024.

Kanari’s art practice explores the aesthetics of horror. Influenced by Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, she investigates the rotten and criminal aspect of the human condition; illness, crime, war, atrocity, as manifested in the forsaken body.

Fabricated from archives, crime scene photography and media-circulated imagery, her paintings blur the line between old and new information and create parallels between what we know as history and our contemporary experience of it. The reworking of the photograph signifies for her an unlearning and relearning of historical narrative, in an attempt to challenge ideas of selective memory, erasure, truth and representation.

Driven by a devotion to painting the figure and a fascination for the ill-treated body, Kanari’s practice is concerned with body politics and the value of a human life or a human’s death. Stripped from any indication of space or time, her figures appear to be suspended and isolated in a liminal state as if captured in a fleeting moment between life and death, existence and non-existence.

Kanari stages an intimate encounter between the viewer and the tragic figure. The eyes of the subject meet or evade the gaze of the viewer in a power play that reveals the power dynamics of looking, as the artist urges us to acknowledge our role as witnesses to humanitarian crises and to contemplate the current condition of the world and our position in it.

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