We at ArtSpark cherish the opportunity to share our space with artists and audiences alike. Beyond our consulting projects, we love to host exhibitions that celebrate creativity and spark conversation!
Nitra Gallery presents the solo exhibition of Tassos Vrettos titled ?Trees Dance!, hosted at ArtSpark.
The new photographic chapter by Tassos Vrettos carries on his long engagement with nature, with what constitutes, inhabits and connects the more-than-human. Following his extensive research into the concept, reality, collective dimension and representation of the forest, which was presented at a broad multimedia program in the city of Chalandri (The Forest’s Riddle, Nov. 4, 2022 – Jan. 15, 2023, “Nobel Building” Cultural Space), Vrettos now focuses on the experience of trees.
Light and movement are the two elements that most strongly characterize this unit, which includes material from several years of the photographer’s wanderings throughout the country.
Continued here is his unique, characteristic research into the relationship of performativity and physicality with photography. In a thoroughly analog manner, without any digital processing or post-processing, the image of the trees emerges from the relationship formed between light, the speed of the photographic shutter, and the speed of the photographer’s movement as he moves in relation to the trees, perceives them, and connects with them.
The “decisive moment” of each photograph is always shaped through the interaction of many elements, materialities, and the invisible energy that holds them together: light, the tree, the human body, time, chance. Nothing is absolutely static and therefore fixed, familiar, an object of representation. Vrettos’s approach invokes not the image but the experience, the embodied knowledge of the tree as the other that is not foreign, does not belong, is not subject to evaluations of usefulness and beauty, and ultimately remains a mystery. As trunks shift, branches disperse, leaves enmesh, colors dissolve into light and shadow, the starting point of the image, the vantage point, ceases to matter. The multifocal experience of this photograph does not hold a single riddle, a latent presence, a hidden point of relief, where the gaze can rest. Instead, it calls on the viewer to let go and surrender to an almost vertiginous relationship, an ec-static entanglement of moments that can never be the same.
The dance, (questioningly and exclamatorily) claimed by the photographer as a quality of the trees, is precisely this contrasting interdependence of things, the highlighting of the importance of nuance, ambiguity, disorder, play, ideas that swirl in materialities and bodies. His photography, waywardly and liberatingly, points the viewer’s gaze beyond the real and the symbolic boundaries of the photographic print; to where the tree is plural and feral.
Tassos Vrettos
Tassos Vrettos has been active in photography since 1979, both through personal artistic projects and as Head of the Photography Department at the publishing company Grammi, later at Lambrakis Press Group, and today as the founder of Studio Vrettos. He also collaborated with Manos Hadjidakis on the magazine To Tetarto.
In his personal work, he explores the human condition, nature, identity, the body, and diverse social and cultural realities through a distinctive and highly recognizable photographic language.
Tassos Vrettos’s exhibition history extends across major institutions and events in Greece and abroad. Selected solo presentations include The Forest’s Riddle at the “Nobel” Building, Cultural Space of the Municipality of Chalandri (2022–2023), The Feel. Backstage at the Athens Epidaurus Festival (2021), Wor(th)ship: Tassos Vrettos at the Benaki Museum, Athens (2015–2016), a presentation at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles (2016), The Hole Argument in collaboration with the Athens International Film Festival – Opening Nights, at The Breeder (2010), Athens: The City and the Cinema at the Benaki Museum (2009), and Homo Ludens at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (2005).
He has also participated in major group and international exhibitions, including presentations at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (HELL AS PAVILION, 2013), Faggionato Fine Arts in London, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, and the Athens Concert Hall, while his work has been shown in exhibitions and events in Greece, France, Spain, and Belgium.
His work has been featured in major publications and photography catalogues in Greece and abroad, including Athens: The City and the Cinema (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 2009), Mysteries and Miracles – Photography Beyond Representation (Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, 2005), Photography and Fashion (Athens Concert Hall, 2005), and The Hole Argument (Saprophyta Publications, 2010). Further selected publications include The Nude in Greek Photography (Kochlias Publications, 2004), Ellinomouseion (Militos Publications, 2001), Thrace – Terra Incognita (1997), and Revelations, in collaboration with Dionysis Fotopoulos (Adam Publications, 1989).
Duration: September 24 – November 10, 2026
Opening Hours Tuesday – Wednesday 12.00 – 17.00 & Thursday – Friday 12.00 – 19.00 Saturday11.00-15.00 & by appointment
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