Kallirroi Ioannidou: Like Kids on a new planet - On View at Galerie Mellies, Detmold

Deep Dive into Greek/German Artist Kallirroi Ioannidou current exhibition "Like Kids on a new planet" at Galerie Mellies, Detmold

Berlin-based Greek/German Artist Kallirroi Ioannidou works fluidly across painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation — her practice shaped as much by spatial logic as by subconscious tempo.

"Her works don’t illustrate thoughts — they breathe them out, like a second skin made of time, matter, and questions."

Her latest exhibition, Like Kids on a New Planet, on view at Galerie Mellies in Detmold, invites us into that fragile state where perception hasn’t settled yet — and maybe never will.

Some works ask to be seen. Others ask you to unsee.

Kallirroi Ioannidou’s practice does neither. It simply sits there—quietly shifting—until you realize something has changed. Not the work. You.

Ioannidou moves fluently between drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, treating each not as a separate category but as a different breath in the same body.

Her pieces are not declarations. They’re conditions. Like temperature. Like gravity. Like doubt.

Born in Stuttgart and raised in Thessaloniki, where she completed her degree in urban planning, Ioannidou brings with her both architectural logic and intuitive resistance.

Before studying fine art at the UdK in Berlin—where she now lives and works—she trained in spatial planning, an education that still flickers through her work like a ghost structure.

But there’s nothing dry or calculated here. Her forms resist neatness. They lean, slip, dissolve. A sculpture bends slightly inward.

A painting seems to erase itself mid-sentence. A glass form doesn’t quite hold together.

She’s not interested in perfection. She’s after presence.

Her 2024 painting Three Hours of Sleep looks like a moment caught just before it vanishes. Oil on cotton, loose but deliberate, the canvas feels like it’s breathing. Not metaphorically—but actually expanding and contracting in front of you.

It’s less an image and more a residue. The kind of mark left behind by a thought that couldn’t settle.

Across her practice, Ioannidou treats material as if it remembers. Glass is not cold. It’s trembling. Paper doesn’t carry the drawing—it absorbs it like a bruise.

In one recent installation, a sequence of sculptures and wall drawings seems arranged by instinct rather than order. They don’t illustrate a story. They resonate like echoes of a conversation you just missed.

And that’s where the work lives—in what resists capture. The in-between. The unformed. The unsaid.

Ioannidou’s refusal of focal points or linear narratives isn’t an aesthetic choice. It’s philosophical.

Her art is not about showing something. It’s about letting it become. That includes you, the viewer. Nothing is fixed. Meaning flickers.

But don’t mistake this for softness. There’s rigor here—just not the kind that tightens. It’s the rigor of letting go. Of trusting that something will emerge if you don’t force it.

Her works speak to the tension of the contemporary human condition—not through big statements, but through quiet confrontation. What does it mean to exist in fragments? To never fully arrive? To remain in flux?

These are not questions Ioannidou answers. They are questions she gives form to.

In this way, her practice echoes artists like Eva Hesse or Katinka Bock—those who understand that material is never neutral, and that emotion can live in texture.

Like Hesse, Ioannidou builds vulnerability into the bones of her work. And like Bock, she uses form not to assert but to ask.

What’s radical here is the permission to stay uncertain. In a world that demands clarity, Ioannidou’s work allows pause. It invites us into a slower tempo, one where not knowing isn’t failure—but possibility.

Her studio reflects this ethos. Nothing hierarchical. Sketches next to sculptures. Test materials alongside finished works. A space where ideas breathe without deadline. It’s not chaotic—it’s alive.

Technically, she’s precise. But never rigid. A line can hold a structure or fall apart. A shape can carry a body or a mood. Her decisions come from deep listening—to material, to intuition, to the rhythm of not yet.

In an age of instant answers, Ioannidou makes a case for hesitation. Her work doesn’t demand understanding. It creates space for it.

And in that space, something rare happens: you don’t just see art. You feel it thinking.

Key Themes

• Transformation and instability
• The unseen labor of form
• Time, presence, and psychic rhythm
• Subconscious association over linear narrative
• Systems of perception and soft resistance

Notable Works / Visual Motifs

• Three Hours of Sleep, 2024, oil on cotton (55 × 40 cm)
• Sculptural glass forms with soft curvatures
• Graphite drawings without central focus
• Installation views combining wall drawings and free-standing structures

Positioning in Contemporary Art

Ioannidou belongs to a quiet revolution in contemporary practice - artists who build emotional intelligence into matter, who think through touch, and who offer resistance not through protest, but through presence.

Her work isn’t illustrative. It’s infrastructural.

It reshapes how we stand in relation to things.

For more visit  Galerie Mellies online or on Instagram.
Exhibition Duration: 11. May - 13. July 2025!

GALERIE MELLIES – Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst

GALERIE MELLIES

Follow Kallirroi Ioannidou on Instagram for further projects.

Kallirroi Ioannidou

Kallirroi Ioannidou

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