Marianna Ignataki

Soft, Sharp and Hollow, Like their Breath

Until 14 March 2026

CAN Gallery presents the solo exhibition of Marianna Ignataki, “Soft, Sharp and Hollow, Like their Breath”, featuring sculptures, paintings on canvas, and works on paper. The exhibition brings together a mature body of work, articulating a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice continuing her ongoing engagement with the body, gender, and the image.

Marianna Ignataki belongs to a generation of women artists who approach painting and sculpture not as representational tools, but as sites of critical thought. As Griselda Pollock has observed, feminist practice in art does not simply add new images, but transforms the conditions of visibility. In Ignataki’s work, the gendered figure is not positioned as an object to be seen, but as a site of tension and transformation, resisting fixed or stable categories.

In the paintings and works on paper, the portrait is stripped of any psychologic certainty. Double, blurred, or obscured faces, withdrawn gazes, and details that unsettle any sense of stability give rise to images suspended between dream and reality. Their aesthetic ranges from restrained, elliptical representations to more complex, timeless compositions, drawing on references to the circus, theatre, and role-play. Within this field, the figure appears as a performativity that may be authentic or constructed, lasting or provisional. As Judith Butler writes, “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame”, thus it is not something we are, but something we do again and again — a position that, in Ignataki’s work, takes the form of an indeterminate condition of recognition, where images remain open and the responsibility for meaning shifts toward the viewer.

In the sculptures, fabric and hair, synthetic materials, and wigs function as the three-dimensional extension of this painterly investigation. Soft yet sharp, they resemble bodies that have been assembled, worn, and left behind—like shells suspended in the moment after exhalation. The use of masks and hybrid bodies resonate with Hélène Cixous’s call to “write yourself. Your body must be heard”, a practice in which the body is neither explained nor represented, but speaks through ruptures, excess, and transformations.

In a moment of heightened visibility and expanding forms of gendered and bodily expression —alongside strong resistance against them—Ignataki’s creatures form an alternative community. The strange, the monstrous, and the “other” are not framed as threats, but as a shared terrain. As Donna Haraway has argued, what we need are not “pure” identities but relations, kinships, and hybrids — a position that echoes through Ignataki’s universe, where forms are allowed to exist without being fixed or resolved.

The exhibition “Soft, Sharp and Hollow, Like their Breath” does not propose narratives nor illustrates positions. Instead, it presents forms in continuous transition—images that breathe, empty out, and return— opening a space of slowing down and resistance in which the image remains an encounter or an experience rather than an answer. In this way, Ignataki repositions painting and sculpture as spaces where the body can exist freely, without boundaries or certainties. Materiality, in her case, does not serve to imitate the body but to retain its memory; her materials acting as traces—often familiar and intimate—like the lingering remains of a breath that has not yet faded.

Bio. Marianna Ignataki (b. 1977) was born in Thessaloniki and lives and works in Berlin. Her practice encompasses painting, sculpture, drawing, and video, and focuses on the creation of a personal, mythological universe in which bodies and subjects appear fluid, mutable, and in constant negotiation. Her work explores questions of identity, self-perception, and otherness, alongside the attraction to fear, the fascination with the carnivalesque, and the use of the mask as a vehicle for freedom and transformation. Ignataki studied Architecture at the Technische Universität in Vienna and Fine Arts at the École des Beaux-Arts in Saint-Étienne, France. Between 2010 and 2017, she lived and worked in Beijing. She has presented numerous solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in Greece and internationally, and has participated in major group shows across Europe, China, and the United States. In 2025, she presented the solo exhibition The Enlightened Ones, the Green Horses, and Some More Bitches at MOMus – Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki. She is represented by CAN Christina Androulidaki Gallery (Athens) and works in collaboration with frontviews (Berlin) and Reiter Galleries (Berlin–Leipzig). Her recent group exhibitions include The Allure of the Bizarre at the National Gallery of Athens (2025); TERRA DIASPORA – Changing Worlds, Kunstverein Göttingen (2024); A:PRÉS D:ESSÉRT, A:D: Curatorial, Berlin (2023); Kreatur, Reiter Galleries, Berlin (2022); Drawing Wow, Minuseins, Vienna (2022);  Public Domain, MOMus Museums, Thessaloniki (2022); Eidyllia Odos, Contemporary Art Museum of Crete and Technopolis Museum, Athens (2022); CRUSH, organized by The Finnish Institute in Germany at Feld + Haus, Berlin (2022), CHARTA II, Identity and Narration, frontviews at HAUNT, Berlin (2021),  KI-ΝΗΜΑΤΑ, Bouboulina Museum, Spetses (2021); Gods and Monsters: Blick Auf Die Jüngste Vergangenheit, Kunstverein Montez, Frankfurt (2021); Homeostasis, Frontviews at Heit, Berlin (2019); Overview Effect: Encountering the Cosmos, MOMus Museums, Thessaloniki (2019); Athens Photo Festival, Benaki Museum, Athens (2019); Am I that Name or that Image, MoCA Skopje (2019); What is Eros, MOMus Museums, Thessaloniki (2019); Reverse the Perspective, Xiangsi Art Museum, Tianjin (2015); Dialog between Chinese and International Artists, Taihang Huang Shan, Renmin University Museum, Beijing (2014); The Beautiful Is Just The First Degree of the Terrible, the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2009) and the 13th Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Bari (2008).

Opening Hours: Tuesday – Friday 12 – 8 pm and Saturday 12 – 4 pm

CAN Christina Androulidaki gallery

Chalkokondyli 19

10432, Athens

+30.210.523.5529

info@can-gallery.com

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