Artwork: Self-Portrait by Vasso Tzouti

About the Artist

Vasso Tzouti explores the predispositions of the female soul that correspond to emotional, behavioral, and cognitive models as systematic elements of the unconscious; patterns that define the way of processing senses, perceptions, and symbols. Through her work – in painting, photography, set design, and writing –, she creates a range of experiences as a way out for her personal temperament via sentimental reactions with subconscious influences. Her forms are chaotic compositions of violent strokes, painted bluntly, swiftly; pure colors often straight out of the tube cover the surface of her unframed, roughly cut canvas. Forms sometimes dynamic and absolute, sometimes fragile and otherworldly that draw from pictures of family and friends staged by the artist in poses inspired by films, sports, celebrities or from images in fashion magazines or ads, cutouts of figures as repeat patterns on paper. The artist follows the intricate meanders of psyche and asks whether this psyche is male, or female—or other. Her works mirror and reflect extreme emotional states, everyday forms of behavior and perceptions of senses, mirrored and transformed in the patterns of the unconscious.