East of Eden
2000
Photography
Photographic installation
6 prints on high-gloss paper
89 x 79,5cm each
Purchased in 2024
Inv. No 1535/24
Despina Meimaroglou (1944, Alexandria, Egypt) began her systematic engagement with art in the 1980s, following fine arts and typography studies and a professional tenure in advertisement and visual communication for over a decade. Due to her background in mass media, she developed a unique artistic approach which involved using existing published material like newspaper articles, magazine clippings, advertisements, news, and documentaries to create new works. She focused on stories often overlooked by the mainstream narrative and deconstructed how mass media constructs an artificial reality. In her work, she uses mixed printing techniques and realises video installations or uses the book format. She centres on issues of political violence, even when this affects the personal spheres of the body, gender, and family. Overexposure to information has caused desensitisation and has led to its normalisation, a development that Despina Meimaroglou recognises and strives to nullify with her work.
A Pack of Lies (1997) consists of a series of photographic printings that depict three variations on the face of an aged Barbie doll, as well as its full-body portrayal bearing signs of physical abuse. For these works, Meimaroglou reverted to image processing applications to combine aspects of the children’s toy with photographs of mature women in a gesture that epitomises the non-realistic standards of beauty and their relation with direct physical violence. Respectively, through digital image processing, she forged the work East of Eden (2000), a photographic installation of six printings with portraits of women. An article about a trafficking case where six women from countries of Eastern Europe were sold as slaves to countries in Western Europe stood as the triggering event for this work. Here, Meimaroglou employs, once again, image processing applications to combine elements from photographic portraits of women gathered from fashion and lifestyle magazines, correlating the construction of beauty standards with the literal commercialisation of the human body.
Despina Meimaroglou was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She lives and works in Athens. She studied painting, printmaking, and graphic arts at Maidstone College of Art in England (1961–1965). From 1966 on, she settled in Athens, initially working in the field of visual communication and advertising, while from the early 1980s on, she focused exclusively on the visual arts. She has held many solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions in Greece and abroad (selection): 2nd Biennale of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2009), “Genius Seculi” – Despina Meimaroglou & Deimantas Narkevicius, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2008), The Athens Effect, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, and Fondazione Mudima, Milan (2006-2007), Fusion Cuisine, Foundation for Contemporary Art DESTE, Athens (2002), Mythologies of the Book: Contemporary Greek Artists, Frankfurt Book Fair (2001).