How drinking affects our courage and creativity

Featuring 15 large-scale paintings, Cypriot artist Zenon Jepras’ latest solo show Last Orders opens on Thursday. Hosted at Alpha CK Art Gallery, the exhibition will run for 10 days and explores the habits of today’s modern society carried on from past eras.

In his latest series, the artist presents in his characteristic story-telling manner how Western culture through the shared experience of drinking alcohol many millennia ago and ever since has proved to be the source of much courage and creativity, inspiration and forgetting.

As the artist writes in the exhibition catalogue: “No wonder then that the artist’s eye has traditionally wandered freely from subject to glass and back again, especially in troubled times. Poets and painters are always interested in human character and how we express our humanity. Especially how we face up to mounting anxieties and pressures, the irony of isolation and division with ever-increasing inter-connectedness, meaningless chatter and visual overload.”

Commenting on the artist’s pieces, the exhibition organisers say: “In Jepras’ works, The Bar is a microcosm of this. Not just a place of solace and escape, where sorrows are drowned, but also of togetherness and defiance; where stories are told as we laugh at ourselves and the absurdity of everything that doesn’t really matter.”

Jepras was born in 1969 in Cardiff, Wales. He studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and throughout his career he has presented work in solo and group exhibitions around Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of the Cypriot State Collection of Contemporary Art, the Central Bank of Cyprus Collection, the Bank of Cyprus Collection, the Nikos Pattichis Collection, the Luciano Benetton Collection and in numerous private collections in Cyprus, Greece, the US and the UK.

Last Orders

Solo exhibition by artist Zenon Jepras. June 1-10. Alpha C.K. Art Gallery, Nicosia. Opening night: 7pm. Tuesday – Friday: 10am – 1pm and 4pm – 6.30pm, Saturday:10am – 1pm. Tel: 22-751325. www.ackgallery.com