Zoumboulakis Galleries present the exhibition of Nikos Alexiou, “The End. A Study of the Infinite,” curated by Christoforos Marinos. Marking fifteen years since the artist’s death, the gallery revisits a section of the emblematic work The End, which represented Greece at the Venice Biennale, highlighting its enduring relevance despite the temporal distance from its original presentation. The central installation and projection are accompanied by a selected group of Alexiou’s works.
Art historian and curator Christoforos Marinos notes:
“The re-presentation of The End, almost twenty years later and in a new version, cannot be separated from the absence of Nikos Alexiou himself, who passed away prematurely in February 2011. Today, his work — a body of work that poetically and enigmatically illustrated the notion of the end — is called upon to exist without the presence of the one who continuously activated it through gesture and thought. This absence, however, does not turn The End into a monumental relic; on the contrary, it makes even more visible its fundamental quality as a handcrafted practice operating within time. Nothing closes definitively; whatever reappears lives only through its recontextualization.
For Alexiou, the experience of an artwork is grounded in an ‘oblique’ relationship — a journey in which the gaze does not dominate but wanders and returns. As early as his 2007 interview, he spoke of the end not as closure but as a moment of concentration: approaching the end clarifies what has preceded it, since the end reveals the path, not the other way around. Today, this thought carries a different weight. The End, without its creator present, now organizes itself around memory, absence and void, shifting the emphasis from gesture to trace.
The new version of The End at Zoumboulakis Gallery constitutes a recontextualization rather than a retrospective gesture. Its reappearance forcefully reintroduces the question of the relationship between the end and the infinite. What is presented was conceived from the outset to transform, to adapt to new spaces and function within different temporal frameworks without losing its core. In an era where the end is often experienced as rupture or exhaustion, Alexiou’s work proposes a different understanding: the end as a ritual point of contact with living form — with what Henri Focillon described as the ‘life of forms.’ To encounter it again today, in a time of acceleration and constant image consumption, means approaching it as a proposal for another temporality. It is an open work, in a state of perpetual duration — always here, as an artistic vision that survives, transforms and returns.”
The exhibition is supported by AMKE O Megalos Kipos – Nikos Alexiou Archives.
The presentation in Athens serves as an introduction to the forthcoming retrospective of Nikos Alexiou at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete in May 2026.
Short Biography
Nikos Alexiou, one of the most significant artists of his generation, was born in Rethymno in 1960. He first studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (1982–1983) and subsequently at the Athens School of Fine Arts, in the printmaking studio of K. Grammatopoulos. His first solo exhibition (1985, Desmos) presented compositions made of natural materials (stone, wood, mud, etc.), reflecting his early explorations of primordial human constructions.
As his practice evolved, his interest turned toward natural phenomena — particularly movement and the reflections of light, the analysis of light rays, and the projection of iridescence onto surfaces and water. He created installations featuring lace-like geometric constructions made of reed or paper, in varying scales, forming fluid and poetic environments often charged with symbolic resonance. His work encompasses references to tradition and historical memory, employing an impressive range of media, from fragile handcrafted structures to advanced technology.
From 2003 onward, Alexiou engaged deeply with themes and motifs drawn from the Monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, which he visited frequently. He succeeded in conveying the mysticism and richness of religious architecture through complex, multilayered means, combined with a contemplative and introspective sensibility.
He represented Greece at the Alexandria Biennale and at the Venice Biennale with his widely discussed work The End, a large-scale installation inspired by the mosaic floor of the katholikon of the Monastery of Iviron. A condensed version of the project, featuring digitally processed renderings of the same mosaic, was presented in parallel in Athens (Zoumboulakis Gallery, 2007) and Munich (Françoise Heitsch / Gallery for Contemporary Art, 2007). In a similar manner, large-scale digital prints depicting St Mark’s Square and Basilica in Venice were shown at Zoumboulakis Gallery in 2010, marking a second phase of the same artistic trajectory.
Alongside his visual art practice, Alexiou designed sets for numerous theatrical productions, primarily in Greece. He collaborated with the dance-theatre company Omada Edafous, founded by Dimitris Papaioannou, as well as with many prominent theatre groups. He was also a collector of contemporary art.
Until his untimely death (Athens, 2011), he had presented his work in more than fifteen solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions in Greece and abroad.
Exhibition duration: 26 February – 28 March 2026
