Sylvia Kouvali, 12a Bourdon Street, London W1K 3PG, UK
www.sylviakouvali.com Instagram: @sylvia-kouvali
A new gallery? No, Sylvia Kouvali has recently rebranded her Rodeo space to more personal and less programmatic effect. The Greek gallerist founded Rodeo (Latin: ‘to circulate’) in Istanbul in 2007, looking to bring together the unnecessarily separated scenes of Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. Rodeo moved to London in 2014, then added a space in Piraeus, Athens’ port, in 2018. Since 2020, Kouvali has been based in the light touch conversion of a former stables – original 1890’s features from which have been retained to keep it refreshingly different from the more usual pristine white cube. Shows there, just a stirrup-chuck from Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill space, often run in parallel with those in Greece: both are self-contained, but you can see the ‘other half’ on the laptop of Katy Green, who has worked with the gallery for several years and is the person you are mostly likely to meet.
So what will you find? Typically, materiality in the service of ideas: Haris Epaminonda, Christodoulos Panayiotou and Iman Issa are favourites of main whose sculptural installations fit that categorisation; but so in a different way do the films of James Richards and Leslie Thornton, which tend to foreground their medium. Kouvali also represents the veteran American artist Liliane Lijn, based in London since 1966, a pioneer in the use of kinetic text. Just now you can see something as unexpected as that was sixty years ago: performative paintings of the sea bed, made underwater – in a full diving suit – by the Greek artist Yiannis Maniatakos (1935-2017).
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
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Art critic and curator, based near Southampton. I write most regularly for Art Monthly, Frieze, World of Interiors, Seisma, Border Crossings, Artlyst, … and, of course, FAD.
