Rea was born in Athens but she was taken to London when she was 17 months old. So she experienced Greece as both an insider and an outsider and with a kind of enthusiastic innocence. Coming from England, where she grew up, the impact of the Greek light when I came every Summer, was like having veils removed from her eyes, to see the world for the first time in all its shining glory.
She could believe that Apollo, the sun god, was born on Delos and Aphrodite from the sea’s foam near Paphos. Rocks become sea nymphs; mountains are sleeping gods; winds are blown by demi-gods and the sea’s quixotic nature, from silvery calm to dark turbulence, is the force against which, like Odysseus, we test ourselves.
Whoever comes to Greece is struck by the special timeless atmosphere: an energy in the light and landscape that links us to the myths and history of Greece’s past, but is also ever present – both timeless and eternal. Rea hopes that her paintings convey some of these feelings.
Videos which show other aspects of my work as curator, artist and collaborator with Burgh House and Hampstead Museum in London:
Web VideoWeb VideoOther information can be found on my website www.reastavropoulos.com
Who is Who
Rea Stavropoulos is a British artist of Greek origin who works internationally. Currently based in London and Brighton, United Kingdom, she continues to collaborate with arts organisations in Florence where she had a studio for 16 years. She studied Art in London (St Martin’s School of Art), Paris (Beaux Arts) and Florence and has exhibited her paintings, artists books and three dimensional works in private and public spaces all over Europe and in Brazil since 1976.
Her practice involves collaborative projects, installations, teaching, lecturing, writing, curating, advocacy and campaigning for women artists. Her work is in private and public collections all over the world. Her artist’s books were acquired for the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2011 and her artworks are in both private and public collections all over the world. She was an Advocate for Advancing Women Artists (AWA) in Florence and writes on art and culture related subjects for “The Florentine”.
She runs art courses in London and Florence and since the first lockdown in the UK she has been running a weekly class online. This (5 October 2021) is the 81st successive week since she started the online classes.
During 2020 when it was not possible to exhibit in the “real’ world, she participated in various online exhibitions and events, including AWA’s “Garzoni Challenge”, an international exhibition in collaboration with the Uffizi Gallery and, through her paintings and writing, in Burgh House and Hampstead Museum’s “Art in Adversity” exhibition, showing how creativity helped people through lockdown.
