Alma Contemporary Art Gallery

A small change,
Oil on canvas,
100 x 150 cm,
2021-22

In this series of works from the last four years, Rania Rangou masterfully mixes images of contemporary life with traces of the city's past. In the seemingly ambivalent present lies the certainty of duration. A historical succession, a temporal palimpsest unfolds as a miracle, revealing a symmetry in the chaos, creating an underlying sense of security, duration, endurance.

Back to back,
Acrylics on canvas,
100 x 100 cm,
2023

Christoforos Marinos, the curator of the exhibition, notes in the text of the catalogue.

“….Rangou paints five works in one, images within images. The work for her is indeed a palimpsest, which is structured by layers, erasures, overlaps and deliberate mistakes repeated with varying results…

…For Rangou, there is no ideal or complete painterly image. The seemingly realistic or normal - a space, for example - suddenly becomes completely unreal, and vice versa. The images she paints move, as she says, between the unreal and the absolutely real. This is why she is interested in collage, which, beyond technique, as a primary form of postmodern dialogue, governs the heterogeneous, multiple and paradoxical reality. It is worth mentioning here that the concept of the synthesis of heterogeneous images and motifs has been of interest to her from the very beginning - and it is no coincidence that the subject of her thesis at the ASFA was the intersection of cultures.”

Depends,
Oil & gesso on canvas,
250 x 120 cm,
2022

Rania Rangou studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1989-1994), the School of Fine Arts in Madrid (1994-1995), the School of Visual Arts (MA in Music and Sound Techniques) and at the New School University (MA in Video Art) in New York. She has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Her works are in private and public collections, including the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art at the Rethymnon Art Centre and the Thracian Art Foundation. She lives and works in Athens.