Myth Unbound: new exhibition at AG Leventis Gallery

Public and private works look at the legends of Ariadne and Andromeda finds ELENI PHILIPPOU

The latest addition to Nicosia’s art scene is a temporary exhibition at the AG Leventis Gallery that places myths, women and history at the forefront. Titled Myth Unbound: Ariadne – Andromeda, the exhibition will run until September telling tales of Cyprus and Greek mythology.

“Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader,” Natalie Haynes wrote in her book Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths. The above could also have been the starting point that led the curators of the exhibition to present, perhaps for the first time in the world, Myth Unbound: Ariadne – Andromeda.

In reality, this exhibition began from a collection and an idea. Dr Andreas Pitta has in his collections works related to the myth of Ariadne and Andromeda. Outstanding works that mark milestones in European Art History but also works that are thematically linked to two women whose myths, and stories, were a revelation for the curators of the exhibition. Both heroines, Ariadne and Andromeda, associate their name and their legend with Cyprus. Ariadne was abandoned on the coast of Cyprus, in Amathus, by her lover Theseus, while Andromeda’s powerful father was Cephaes, founder of Kyrenia.

“Both Ariadne and Andromeda,” comment the exhibition organisers, “represent themes that have long been intertwined with the fate of women in a male-dominated world: marriage and childbirth, freedom and servitude, with their home crushed by tragedy and heartbreak. And yet, in this exhibition, their role is not limited to that of ‘domesticity at risk’: the alluring female figure that functions as an object of desire. Instead, by examining together iconography and texts, yesterday and today, we discover together deeper truths of human nature, through new, bold readings.”

The exhibition focuses on important works from the Pitta Collection, combining a contemporary presentation, with the help of interactive projections, bringing together ancient Greek mythology through centuries of Western art. Revealing great stories of love, (self-)sacrifice and betrayal, the pains of motherhood but also the eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth. It includes archaic clay figures of the Cypriot Ariadne/Venus to 20th-century art, and from Euripides’ Andromeda to contemporary poetry, visual and written references are juxtaposed with contemporary feminist reinterpretations.

“The exhibition,” conclude organisers, “is equally important as a result of the close collaboration between a museum and a private collection, between the Leventis Gallery and Dr Andreas Pitta, distinguished collector and member of the Gallery’s Honorary Committee. As such, it offers visitors the unique opportunity to explore not only an interesting and original theme but also a set of exceptional works of art rarely exhibited in public, while at the same time, the fuller narrative of the myth is aided by loans of ancient objects from the Cyprus Museum and the Kykkos Holy Monastery Museum.”

Myth Unbound: Ariadne – Andromeda

Temporary exhibition. Until September 3. A.G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia. Wednesday: 10am-8pm. Thursday-Sunday: 10am-5pm. www.leventisgallery.org