Katerina Nikolaidou

Katerina Nikolaidou is a 22 years old freelance artist based in Cyprus which graduated Fine arts from the De Montford University in Leicester England.  Katerina has been dabbling in fine arts by a young age and has been professionally pursuing a career in art since the age of 18. Her work has been featured at many notable group exhibitions and projects such as ‘The state of Art 2’’ lightbox Gallery in Leicester in 2017, ‘De Montfort’s University exhibition’ in Leicester in 2019, ‘The Art of sustainability’ in Florida-Palm Bay – U.S.A in 2018 and finally ‘abandoned’ at the Exhibit 8 gallery in Limassol in 2020. Her work is often shared on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and through interviews with websites. By sharing her work, she hopes to be an inspiration for the next generation of artists entering the industry.

The series of paintings is an exploration of the renaissance wallpapers which demands an evolution into the contemporary art. The subject matter of the body of work is the idea of bringing into the contemporary art, art elements that they have been left behind and give them the attention that they seek to get. By embodying the idea of wallpaper into a canvas automatically creates the classical element modern, although the absence of the background, the unfinished touch, the intense shades of paint and the fact that the patterns are not flat but they have depth and light, and even the touch of the abstract art inside some pieces it gives to the wallpaper the ability to come back in time and become modern.

Furthermore, by embodying the human figure inside some paintings in such a realistic and classic form but still having an abstract element as they all get mixed together and they create an illusion of space, it gives to the artworks a mysterious form of time and space. This occurs by the fact that, the appearance of the wallpaper patterns as well, behind the figures it is mainly used to give the sense of the time as something classic and old but with the usage of the figures and the way that they are painted in such an abstract figurative and realistic way in the same time, it gives to the artwork automatically the sense of the modern and contemporary.

The paintings are not representing just a decorative paper on the wall, but they demonstrate the power of how the contemporary art can take something old and forgotten and metamorphose it to something new.