Open Closed Doors

Art in Berlin now: Christina Dimitriadis Works included in the exhibition: Open/Closed Doors

At first glance, it looks a little confusing at the Eigen + Art Gallery. The three large-format photographs from Christina Dimitriadis show an ethereal emptiness, a seeming fit with the gallery’s sometimes egocentric-leaning program. In Dimitriadis’ series one sees nothing but a white room with a white door which is both simultaneously closed and half-open: shimmering, white, blurred in the overly long exposure time. A formal exercise as a metaphor for life itself: minimal abstraction, undefined floating and finally the extinction of the object – doorways to the interior.

Actually Dimitriadis – born in Thessaloniki in 1967- works in a strong conceptual manner but also in a biographical vein. Her work is about an illusion often gladly referred to as body and identity. The gallery’s back room is hung with the fascinating “Private Space” photos – self-portraits in which Dimitriadis can only be seen schematically, having left the setting of her sofas or beds during the long, endless exposure time. In the new “Open/Closed Doors” series, the game of absence/presence turns into a phantom image of the private sphere, applied to the room as a situation. And actually the translation of inner/outer with opened and closed doors has a secure place in the history of art. After all, a photo from Duchamp himself documents this unclear relationship.