KATES-FERRI PROJECTS welcomes Iasonas Kampanis who during the month of December 2025 will be creating new paintings for a duo exhibition titled Myth & Kinship in New York City slated to open January 2026.
Bio: Iasonas Kampanis was born in 1985 in Athens (Greece), where he currently lives and works. He studied silversmithing and jewelry design at the Mokume Institute in Thessaloniki. Since 2007, he is working with painting, photography, digital media and scenographic works.
His work is rooted in the origins of worship and Mediterranean animistic traditions, attuned to mystical kinship with non-human beings and to the re-enchantment with the spirits of place.
In 2020 he received the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Award by ARTWORKS.
He has collaborated and exhibited, among others, with the Museum of Cycladic Art, Aphrodite Gonou, Rebecca Camhi Gallery, Marina Fokidis, Breeder Gallery, Wilhelmina’s Gallery, Citronne Galleries, the 61st Thessaloniki International Film Festival and MoMus, KEIV project space, Victoria Square Project, kunsthallekleinbasel, architect Pulcheria Tzova, Onassis Stegi, director Maria Gaitanidi, actress Stacy Martin, Islington Arts Factory, Bishopsgate Institute, Lubomirov/Angus Hughes Gallery, Ligne Roset, Design Exchange magazine, London Print Studio, Christie’s Head of Prints & Multiples Murray Macaulay, Teloglion Art Foundation, choreographer Irina Osterberg, and zoologist Desmond Morris.
He has also been engaged in traditional printmaking, Byzantine murals, film and theater productions, and educational programs.
Artist Statement: My interest is rooted in the origins of worship and our mystical kinship with non-human entities, tracing the layered spiritual geographies of the Mediterranean, a sea where multiple animistic traditions interacted through exchange and syncretism. My work revolves around the region’s early cosmologies, when the world was understood as a pluriverse of interconnected beings, an existence experienced as a community of subjects.
Centuries of doctrinal, colonial, and rationalist overlays reshaped this imagination, elevating the human to the role of divine or nihilistic arbiter and diminishing the animate landscape. Against this lineage of severance, I aim to reclaim an embodied longing to commune with a spiritual and symbolic reality that refuses the division between human and non-human, natural and supernatural.
This finds form through a visual grammar of transformation. Figures are rendered as traces rather than monuments; identities shift, blur, or merge with their environments. Polychromy, stripped from Greek antiquity by Western classicist ideals of purity, returns as a corrective gesture, restoring the Mediterranean’s original multiplicity and resisting the desire for singularity or dominance. Portraiture becomes a relational gaze, attentive to the agency of all beings.
This work is a return to a listening stance: an attempt to re-enter a world that never ceased speaking, though our traditions were trained to ignore it. It is a practice of re-enchantment with the protective spirits of place, and an invitation to join the difficult task of defining ourselves beyond our anthropocentric evocations. It is grounded in my lived memory of culture.