Vana Xenou
Vana Xenou
Visual Artist; Emeritus Professor, ARCH NTUA
Greece
Vana Xenou was born in Athens, Greece in 1949. She studied painting and stage design at the School of Fine Arts in Athens from 1968 to 1973. In 1973, she entered the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She then pursued studies in painting and mosaics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1974 to 1978 and simultaneously attended seminars on aesthetics and philosophy. Today she holds the position of professor emeritus at the Department of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). In 2008, she was nominated as the candidate for Greece for the Women of Europe Award, instituted by the International Association for the Promotion of Women of Europe. In 2014, she was bestowed the honor of Officer of the Order of the Academic Palms by the French Republic.
She has held numerous solo exhibitions with specific thematic approaches, including: Artistic exploration in the world of Lewis Caroll (Athens, Greece, 1982), D’après Judith et Holopherne de Artémisia Gentileschi (Athens, Greece, 1983), D’après Lucrèce de Lucas Cranach (Athens, Greece, 1985), Quotations (New York, USA, 1986), Angels, Earth and Heaven (Athens, Greece, 1989), D’après l’Odalisque de Paul Outerbridge (Patra, Greece, 1992), Eleusinian mysteries I (Patra, Greece, 1992), Eleusinian mysteries II (House of Cyprus, Athens, Greece, 1995), Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece (Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece, 1998), Eleusinian mysteries III (Chapelle de la Salpêtrière, Paris, France, 2000), Éleusis-Perasma (Kronos Old Factory, Eleusis, Greece, under the auspices of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Eleusis, 2004), Psychagogia (Greece, 2005), Arrivée-Passage (Jardins du Palais Royal, Paris, France, with the support of the French Ministry of Culture and Communications, 2007–2008), The Soul of the Place (National Gardens, Athens, Greece, 2010), Passage. With your eyes cast heavenwards (Permanent Sculptural Installation, commissioned by Piraeus Bank Cultural Institution, Athens, Greece, 2012), Les sens politique des lieux sacrés. Athens – Eleusis – Delphi (Fonds culturel de l’Ermitage, Paris, Garches, France, 2017), and To Her (Athens, Greece, 2022). Vana Xenou has participated in numerous group exhibitions both in Greece and abroad. Her work has been showcased in private and public institutions internationally.
Her published books include Selections from the Notebooks of Vana Xenou (1986), Vana Xenou (with texts by C. Mollard, 1995), Angels, Earth and Heaven (1989), Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece (1998), Mystères d’Éleusis (with texts by J.-M. Tasset, 2000), Eleusis-Perasma (with texts by H. Ladia, 2004), Arrivée-Passage (with texts by C. Buci-Glucksmann, 2008), and The Soul of the Place (with texts by E. Daydé and A. Vozani, 2010). Numerous texts have been published about Vana Xenou’s work, including catalogues of solo and group exhibitions, articles, books, academic essays, interviews in magazines and newspapers (such as Beaux Arts Editions, C. Mollard and M. Boulart’s Vana Xenou Ces cités où passent encore les dieux, 2017), and numerous references on the internet.