This evening, Wednesday, September 30, at 6:00 PM, the Gramma_Epsilon Gallery in Athens opens “What Remains, What Changes,” the first solo exhibition in Greece by Maria Jole Serreli , an artist born in Rome in 1975 with ties to Marrubiu, where she lives and works. The project, open to the public until December 30, is curated by Panos Giannikopoulos, curator of the Greek Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, and Paolo Cortese , with the patronage of the Italian Embassy in Athens and the Italian Cultural Institute. This event culminates an already extensive international career: for ten years, Serreli has been engaging with Chinese cultural institutions, and in 2026 she was Art Director of “Digital Fashion: An Oriental Expression of Gravity” at the Yizhihui Art Gallery in Shenzhen, where she designed the exhibition design and two site-specific thread installations. At the latest Milan Fashion Week, the show for designer Huizhou Zhao's MODA Hui brand at Palazzo Turati revolved around a large site-specific installation and her participation as a performative act, using the red thread as a common thread linking East and West. Her works are held in public collections in China, such as the Eachway Art and Fashion Museum in Shenzhen and the Belt and Road Ceramics Expo Center in Rongchang, as well as in Italian museums. Among the most significant exhibitions in her home country were the solo exhibition "A casa aveva tre sedie" at the MUACC in Cagliari, curated by Simona Campus, and the selection, in 2025, of "In tasca solo pezzi di casa" as the image for the 29th edition of Monumenti Aperti.

A dialogue between generations. Cortese himself explains the reason for this choice, retracing the space's origins. " The Gramma_Epsilon Gallery in Athens was born from the idea of highlighting female art," he explains. "From the beginning, we have given voice to artists who, almost all now over ninety, ideally follow the path traced by Mirella Bentivoglio: women who have traversed the history of twentieth-century art and who have left a profound mark on research into language and materials ." With Serreli, however, something changes. " This is the first time the gallery has opened an exhibition featuring a younger artist," Cortese continues, "a figure who connects to the artistic experiences already present in our program without simply being its heir. The idea was to bring the historical avant-gardes into dialogue with the present, to demonstrate that that thread has not been broken but continues to produce new languages ." In this space, according to the curator, Serreli's work finds a natural home: "With her book-object, her experiments, and her research on materials, she fits perfectly into this journey. Her way of working with fabric, thread, and stone speaks the language of the great pioneers we have hosted, but does so with a contemporary sensibility."

The Works. The exhibition features approximately forty works from the main series developed over twenty years: "Ikigai," "Animas," "Il peso del sonno," and "Fili fuori Telaio," alongside the debut of the new series "Senescence." Fibers, ceramics, and marble interact in a non-chronological display, conveying the continuity of a constantly evolving journey that, while constantly evolving, has maintained its identity intact. For over twenty years, Serreli has developed a language that spans diverse forms and materials, centered on a reflection on the body, memory, relationships, and the role of art in the present. A significant part of this journey stems from the family home in Marrubiu, where fabrics, threads, and objects marked by decades of use come from, infusing the work with traces of the lives and gestures that preceded them. Serreli looks forward to this event with evident satisfaction. "I'm delighted," he says, "because this solo exhibition closes a production cycle and opens another, with new exhibition developments. It's an important step, which I feel like a true threshold: I look back at everything I've built and, at the same time, I'm already looking forward to what's to come." For the artist, the exhibition is above all an opportunity for sharing. " It allows me to show my works to the world," she explains, "in their dual soul: the two-dimensional works, but also the sculptures, with the materials through which I tell the story of my Sardinia." Materials that are places and memories, "from the Biancone of Orosei to the obsidian of Marrubiu ," stones and rocks that carry with them the landscape and history of the island. In Athens, after all, Serreli also closes a personal circle. "I started out as a sculptor," she recalls. "After further experiments, with fabric, thread, and the most diverse languages, I returned to sculpture." Perhaps it was an inevitable conclusion; the hand always returns to where it learned to think.

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