Angelos Merges
Overview
“My painting compositions deal with current social issues while exploring painting strategies that correspond to the post-analog era.” - Angelos Merges
Strongly influenced by recent events that have reshaped the socio-political landscape of Greece, Merges proactive focuses on the notion of liminality as a counterintuitively permanent human condition. In his work, seismic events of the last decade are organically blended with personal memories, producing images that are easily interpreted without need for explanation. Urgent issues that emerged as a result of the economic and refugee crisis in Greece organically combine with wistful moments of nostalgia that hark back to his upbringing in the island of Chios. His ambiguous works oscillate between the intimate and the unfamiliar, lingering in an uncanny space of near-recognition.
Taken together, his paintings create an open-ended narrative with immediacy, prompting viewers to position themselves within the stories and draw their own conclusions as to the events that may unfold. In Meges scenes, the exposed and the unseen, the initiated and the outside are positioned in a constant exchange, raising questions about the permanence of one's perspective and the positions of power an individual may hold.
Belonging to a generation of artists who grew up alongside the onslaught of digital culture, Merges approaches painting as a medium that enables the artist to focus on content and method, rejecting the prominence of the screen in everyday life and working against the attention apocalypse.
Biography
Angelos Merges (b.1989, Greece) is an artist based in Zürich, Switzerland. He received an Integrated Masters in Painting from Athens School of Fine Arts in 2020, and a Masters in Fine Art from Zürcher Hochschile der Küste in 2023.
Recent solo exhibitions include: World’s Material (Melanithros Art Space, Athens, 2018). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Municipal Gallery of Athens, Greece (2023), Gallery Thalatta, Athens (2023), Hotel Tiger Offspace, Zürich (2022), Schlieren, Zürich (2022), Art Thessaloniki Fair, Thessaloniki, Greece (2022), Sonnenstube Offspace, Lugano, Switzerland (2022), Zoumboulaki Gallery, Athens, Greece (2022), Archaeological Museum of Agios Nikolaos, Crete, Greece (2021), StandInLine Gallery, Nicosia, Cyprus (2021), Isaia Megaron, Athens, Greece (2021), Alma Gallery, Athens (2021) and Space52 (online) (2020).
He has received multiple awards including the Heinrich Hintermeister-Stiftung (2022), the Zangger Weber Scholarship (2022), the Hirschmann Stipendium Award (2022) and the TrainOSE 150 Years Greek Railway Award (2019). He has undertaken two residencies in London (2022) and Loutraki, Greece (2015). His work is held in the OSE Museum Collection, Athens and private collections in Zürich, Greece and Cyprus.
Works
