As though emerging from some Elysian field inhabited by sensitive colourists, the landscape paintings of Maria Filippakopoulou seem to appeal to today’s viewers inclined to stir the eye. Gleaming planes of colour, clear lines, straight or curved, smooth blocks of colour, and bands that evenly articulate expanses of land: together, these elements compose a series of open-air landscapes. Within them, hills and fields, trees, and only the sparsest human constructions take shape. Bodies of water appear, along with skies, mountains, and clouds, while a few living creatures from the animal realm quietly stand out. The human figure is absent from this particular vision of nature, purified and solitary, where the passing of a lorry in the distance seems to unsettle the stillness of the natural world, as imperceptibly as a small signal post, a discreet irrigation device, a haystack, or a drifting cloud.

Filippakopoulou’s painting generates a rhythm of colour, elevating colour itself to the primary element of the composition. She is drawn to the spiritual dimension of nature, emphasising the inner resonance of the landscape and granting greater weight to its idea than to the faithful rendering of its parts. In the series of oil paintings presented at Kourd Gallery, in the exhibition entitled ‘Splendid scapes of colour’, the artist unfolds her chromatic fields, spaces imbued with a quiet spirituality, centred on the experience and energy of colour. Her landscapes do not present nature as a fully articulated presence, rich in descriptive detail. They neither narrate an idealised nor a utopian vision, nor do they indulge in nostalgia for lost natural paradises. Rather, they evoke the metaphorical, even the magical, dimension of nature, the beauty of the minimal, of empty space, of an indeterminate place.

Non-representational landscapes that affirm abstraction; works shaped by nuanced tonalities, engaging the full spectrum of cool and warm colours; works that assert the sovereign power of monochrome and others that resist patches of colour, traces, and the visible brushstroke have never been absent from European painting since the crossings of the historical avant-gardes in the 20th century, nor from North American and Canadian modernism.

With her oils at Kourd Gallery, Maria Filippakopoulou enters dialogue with this lineage in her own restrained, almost ascetic manner. A manner that seeks not the material presence of the painted surface, but its clear, luminous visualisation.

Eleni Varopoulou
Curator of the exhibition
translated from Greek to English by Anna Zarifi

Kourd Gallery
2, Kassianis & Fanarioton str., 114 71, Athens, Greece.

06.05 – 04.07.2026
Tuesday: 18.00 – 23.00
Wednesday to Friday: 12.00 – 20.00
Saturday: 11.00 – 15.00