Selected Works on Paper
“…Among the exhibition’s standouts are two works by Maria Karametou, who prints photographs on tea bags. Mounted under glass along with a few stray hairs, the artist’s “Smooth” and “Time” reference the cycle of life, with the inherent fugitive nature of her medium underscoring in poetic fashion, the impermanence of our own existence”...
Michael O’ Sullivan, The Washington Post
“A teabag is a teabag is a teabag… Maria Karametou’s work challenges not only this basic assumption, but how we look at art –and photography- as well. Paired with decoratively arranged hair clippings and manipulated black and white images, her teabags happily defy the limitations of conventional photographic practice. Collage, language, found objects, and digital processing…. they’ re all fair game in this radical exploration of creative possibility…. Karametou throws the whole epistemological project of photography out the window, reveling instead in an investigation that is at once provocative, eclectic, and deeply poetic.”
Claudia Bohn – Spector, Independent Curator
Maria Karametou’s weirdly shaped potatoes and eggplants address the idea of man-made perfection. By so doing, Karametou comments on the artificial perfection that society has learned to find appealing rather than looking deeper or seeking out ugly yet healthful alternatives.
D. Dominick Lombardi, “Foodie Fever” Catalog Essay
Maria Karametou, who is both a featured artist and the exhibition curator, has created both photographs depicting fruits and vegetables and sculptures incorporating them. In Peeling Back, she has linked banana peels into chains that metaphorically betray the connections between this super-food and the monoculture it engenders. Our desire for this fruit encourages farmers worldwide to abandon traditional crops, threatening forest land and creating political conditions ripe for abuse. Additional works describe other inclinations. Karametou says that many of our fruits and vegetables are screened for imperfections, creating unnecessary waste of the defective produce. Her piece Restored, consisting of twelve pictures of a strangely shaped eggplant, elevates this rarely seen, intriguing variant.
Eric Celarier, The Washington Sculptor
“Maria Karametou ‘s work is responsible, personal and inventive. At first glance one clearly observes a very rich imagination manifested differently in each of a series of older drawings, non-representational mixed medias and collages, and finally in the constructions, which are made from various everyday materials, and which succeed in being original even within the surrealistic tradition. At the same time however, one has to also admire the deep understanding this creator has of her media, as well as of the materials she uses for each body of work.
This excellent “métier” which defines Karametou’s work is first established in the older drawings, such as for instance in the fascinating “Faces: Me” (graphite), with its magnetic presence, in “Symfora” (ink) and in the “Sunday Visits” (ink), which is an artistic epic of a personal vision. It is expressed in yet a different way and with different “dimensions” in the mixed media paintings, which are autonomous presences but still connect with a unified body of work. Finally, this excellent métier characterizes her constructions, in which the artist’s personal experiences and memories materialize in many original ways and materials.
In the non- representational mixed media works, the otherwise seemingly unrelated collaged elements are orchestrated each time in an absolute harmony of color: various pieces of cloth cut to different sizes and placed in the “right” compositional position, photographs, children’s notes, a stocking, a velvet bow, pieces of hair, and the “burns”, (that are often repeated in such a way as to give dynamism to the canvas surface), are all tied together and carry the composition. The pink, beige, off-white and grey tones that prevail here are combined in such a way as to give the composition a pulsating clarity.
In the constructions, the inspiration with which the artist captures the central idea on the one hand, and the “solutions” with which she has worked out even the smallest details on the other, creates a very strong impression on the viewer. For instance in the construction entitled “I Read”, even though the head and torso of the human figure are missing, we not only “see” the figure, but we also feel her psycho synthesis through the characteristic placement of the hands, the placement of the legs, the sliding of the limps on the seat.
This is work of quality, which ..not only establishes a strong talent but also foreshadows a very positive future.
Dora Iliopoulou – Rogan, Art Critic
(Translated from the Greek)