Is art lonely? An event with Filippos Tsitsopoulos

Filippos Tsitsopoulos will give an illustrated talk about a series of works that examine loneliness in the context of creativity.

This body of work in Is art lonely? is the result of various performances, interviews, drawings, texts and exhibitions that took place in venues including Tate Modern, Serpentine Gallery, Wallace Collection and FACT. The project was recently completed with the final work The Raft – Art is (not) Lonely, which was presented in Belgium in February during The Raft exhibition curated by Jan Fabre and Joanna De Vos.

Using extraordinary and elaborately constructed masks as a form of protection, disguise, performance, or just plain entertainment, Filippos’s work involves an exploration of authentic identity versus performed identity. He considers the often polarised fragmented identities that we perform and how to bring the interiorised authentic self and the exterior constructed self together. His goal is to examine socially constructed patterns of behaviour, create situations in which the participants break or transcend the internal feedback loops that control their own actions, and address the power structures we inhabit and perpetrate. 

Filippos Tsitsopoulos is based in Athens and London and his work draws on theatre, painting and performance art and examines the relationships between them through video, live action, voice, and body language.

Is Art Lonely? has been supported by Arthouse 1 Gallery, London, Rebecca Fairman, Pi Artworks Gallery, London and Yesim Jade Turanli, the Wallace Collection, The Muse Gallery, London, Damien Rayne, Stephen Wright , The house of Dreams Museum and Michael Vaughan.

Production and photos by Sonia Arias Valtuille.