Description

About the artwork:  The Island of Circe.Eurydice Maria Ventouri is a Greek surrealist artist. She is celebrated for her vivid paintings with extraordinary compositions, in which she merges abstraction, representation and reinvention. Eurydice’s works are large in scale and her surrealistic compositions have figurative sources.

Over the course of Eurydice’s career, she continuously experimented, shifting her style to explore new techniques and forms of expression. Such regular reinvention led to a body of paintings and drawings and is characterized by boldness and innovation. The artist says: ‘’ Many of my works have no narrative. So I say that they are objects in themselves, that did not come to tell us anything about the world we live in, but may subconsciously communicate to us through strange unconscious paths of forgotten parameters’’.

For Eurydice Greek mythology is an inexhaustible source of iconographic inspirations with new symbols and versions. Circe is a daughter of the god Helios and either the Oceanid nymph Perse or the goddess Hecate. Circe was renowned for her vast knowledge of potions and herbs. Through the use of these and a magic wand or staff, she would transform her enemies, or those who offended her, into animals.

The best known of her legends is told in Homer‘s Odyssey when Odysseus visits her island of Aeaea on the way back from the Trojan War and she changes most of his crew into swine. He manages to persuade her to return them to human shape, lives with her for a year and has sons by her, including Latinus and Telegonus