Yorgos Stamkopoulos Brings the Electrified Echoes of Berlin Underground to Callirrhoë

Yorgos Stamkopoulos' paintings have always been in conversation with movement—fluid, layered, and restless. His process—scraping away layers of paint to reveal what lies beneath—mirrors a process of continuous construction and deconstruction. His latest exhibition, Electrified Echoes, at Callirrhoë, unfolds as a meditation on shifts that are as much emotional as they are visual. Loss is central to the show, but so is renewal.

Originally from Greece, Stamkopoulos has been based in Berlin for years, and the city has left an undeniable imprint on his work. Beyond the studio, his artistic language was shaped by the city's underground music scene, particularly through his collaborations with DJs at the now-closed Watergate club. That space, a beacon of countercultural energy, thrived on communal intensity—a resonance of bodies, sound, and light. Its closure is more than the loss of a venue; it marks the fading of an era, a shift that Electrified Echoes subtly registers. Yet, instead of nostalgia, Stamkopoulos' canvases vibrate with a kinetic insistence. They hold on to movement itself as a form of resistance, a refusal to settle into stillness.

Stamkopoulos works through an intuitive, process-driven engagement with abstraction. His work embodies a dialogue between control and spontaneity, where the physicality of painting plays a central role. Using non-traditional methods such as sanding and washing, he disrupts the medium’s surface, allowing chance and material behavior to influence the outcome.

His works are shaped through an intricate interplay of addition and subtraction—applying paint, then stripping it away, creating surfaces that hover between presence and erasure. This approach results in compositions that are fluid, fragmented, and open-ended, resisting fixed interpretation and embracing the dissolution of rigid forms.

The exhibition marks a significant evolution in Stamkopoulos’ approach. Where earlier works allowed negative space to play an active role, these new paintings move toward a fully saturated surface—dense, layered, and in constant flux. The interplay of color and texture creates a sense of tension, as if each layer of pigment carries the trace of what came before. His technique—masking, layering, then scraping away—turns the canvas into a site of excavation. This act of removal does not erase so much as reveal, uncovering what was always present beneath the surface.

There is an undeniable sense of rhythm in these works, an echo of the environments that shaped them. Abstract yet visceral, the compositions pulse with an energy that mirrors the immersive intensity of the club space. The blurred boundaries and shifting forms recall both sound waves and city lights—electric, ephemeral. Yet within this movement, there is structure, a deep understanding of balance and contrast that keeps the paintings from dissolving into pure chaos.

But beyond their sonic and urban influences, these works speak to something more universal: the way spaces—physical, emotional, and artistic—are continuously formed and re-formed. The artist captures the paradox of impermanence, how something can be both fleeting and deeply felt. His paintings suggest that movement, even when spurred by loss, is generative. It is in the act of layering and erasing, of marking and unmarking, that something new emerges.

Electrified Echoes is not a lament but an assertion. It acknowledges endings but insists on forward motion. In doing so, Stamkopoulos crafts a body of work that is as much about the past as it is about what comes next. 

The exhibition Electrified Echoes will be on view at Callirrhoë in Athens until March 25th, 2024.