As She Sees It: Three Women, Three Gazes

Opening Reception: Friday 30 May, 7-9:30 p.m.

Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to present As She Sees It: Three Women, Three Gazes, a group exhibition featuring works by Eleni Bagaki, Sofia Mitsola, and Janice Nowinski. As She Sees It brings together three artists who use painting as a lens to examine how women look, are looked at, and reclaim the power of perception. Across different media, styles, and conceptual approaches, the exhibition foregrounds the gaze not as a fixed point, but as an evolving relationship between viewer, subject, and self. Bagaki’s intimate, fragmentary compositions draw on personal and collective memory to explore desire and the blurred line between reality and fiction. Mitsola’s commanding female figures channel myth and performance to challenge traditional modes of eroticism and control. Nowinski’s raw, gestural paintings subvert the classical nude, embracing the awkward, the vulnerable, and the emotionally charged. Together, their practices form a multifaceted terrain that moves between observation to introspection, offering three distinct yet deeply interconnected perspectives of what it means to see—and be seen—on one’s own terms.

Eleni Bagaki’s multidisciplinary practice—spanning text, painting, video, sound, and sculpture—explores the fluid boundaries between autobiography and fiction. Her work often probes the relationship between photography and painting, using personal storytelling as a lens through which to reflect broader social and political realities. Rooted in her own experiences, travels, and encounters, Bagaki's work addresses themes of desire, womanhood, belonging, and selfhood. Her research-based process incorporates material from art history, mass media, feminist literature, and cinema, weaving together personal and collective references, to create layered and intimate narratives.

For the show, Bagaki presents a series of paintings titled Still Life, alongside a new body of works on aluminum. The paintings adopt a quiet, conceptual approach to painting, with soft pastel purples and blues creating a dreamlike, meditative background, upon which subtle layers unfold. Recurring elements from her practice—such as found imagery, collage, and delicate drawings of plants and leaves—intertwine to explore intimacy and the ways we construct and inhabit our personal narratives. Drawing from classical motifs, such as drapery, still life, and portraiture, Bagaki creates compositions, questioning the boundaries between representation and abstraction, surface and depth, the visible and the implied. Next to them, the aluminum works depict intimate fragments of male bodies (like a back, armpit, hand, and leg) and floral imagery, with the cold, industrial material contrasting sharply with the warmth and vulnerability of organic forms. Through tactile interventions—scratching, rubbing, bending—Bagaki disrupts the smooth surface, introducing a human presence that softens the material’s rigidity and heightens a tension between sensuality and detachment. Ultimately, the works reflect on how bodies, desire, and beauty are mediated, perceived, and consumed today.

Sofia Mitsola’s vibrant, enigmatic paintings feature mythological and imagined characters inspired by ancient Greek aesthetics and contemporary pop culture. Often larger than life, her nude figures are set against boldly colored and simply formed backgrounds. Mitsola’s work delves into power dynamics, femininity, and the playful tension between revealment and concealment. With an unflinching gaze, her figures confront the viewer, creating a charged visual encounter that explores themes of voyeurism, control, and dominance. Through this dynamic, she challenges traditional depictions of femininity, constructing new hierarchies of looking and asserting power through scale and presence.

For this exhibition, Mitsola presents a new series of mid-scale paintings. Her works depict confident, stylized female nudes set against deep, nearly monochromatic backgrounds. Some figures assert their dominance through extravagant accessories—such as white feathered animal furs—while others blend human and animal features, evoking surreal and mythological undertones. In the painting titled Priestess, a goddess-like figure appears either enthroned or levitating. The checkered garment and the crescent halo behind her head convey a sense of ritual, mysticism, and ceremonial power. Across the series, the rendering of each face and posture communicates strength, control, and a kind of performative elegance—but ultimately, it is the unwavering gaze of her figures that magnetizes the viewer.

Janice Nowinski’s painting practice begins with found photographs—often generic, ambiguous images that she revisits over time as loose prompts rather than fixed references. These source materials spark a visual impulse that sets each work in motion, allowing the painting to evolve with a sense of unpredictability. Her process embraces intuition, surprise, and a deliberate distance from the weight of art history, granting each piece its own autonomy.

The paintings of the show, while small in scale, possess a striking material and emotional presence. Broad, gestural strokes form dynamic compositions that feel spontaneous yet finely tuned. Behind their apparent ease lies a private, rigorous drafting process with depth and clarity. Nowinski’s loosely rendered, often comic nudes subvert traditional ideals of beauty and eroticism. Built from expressive, sometimes anatomically implausible brushwork, these figures reclaim power through their unruly physicality and irreverent charm. In all, Nowinski reinvigorates the act of painting through a blend of raw immediacy, conceptual clarity, and deep engagement with process—producing works that are both self-aware and boldly free.