The Paddocks Gallery is pleased to present Small Tiny Worlds, a group exhibition featuring small-scale and miniature works by 15 local and international artists: Lila Agrafioti, Manolis Angelakis / tind, Maria Bampali, Katerina Giannitsi, Korina Kamalakidou, Katerina Karatzaferi, Cyrus Mahboubian, Viktoria Nianiou, Elina Niarchou, Charlotte Niewenhuys, Alexia Psaradeli, Lea Riggi, TEFRA90, Kleopatra Tsali, Kyvèli Zoi.
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.” once quoted the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (New York Post, 1946). In such a moment, when one looks closely, time seems to slow down, and the smallest detail becomes magnified. Echoing this sense of intimacy and presence, Small Tiny Worlds centres on the proximity, tenderness, and observation, that works on a smaller scale invite.
By bringing together works by our growing community of artists alongside long-time collaborators, based in Volos, Athens, Tinos, London, and Spain, the exhibition celebrates the breadth and diversity of their practices. Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, drawing, textiles, silkscreen printing, and engraving, Small Tiny Worlds approaches small-scale works as openings into the complexity, imagination, and sensitivity embedded within them.
Rooted in personal geographies, Kyvéli Zoi’s vivid painting Ampelokoutsoura draws on the traditional dance of Ikaria, evoking a sense of belonging through its playful perspective. Echoing this connection to place and collective memory, Kleopatra Tsali brings together clay and found glass from Naxos, enclosing fragments of lived experience within material forms. Intuition and emotional nuance run through Maria Bampali’s intuitive drawings: from Bloomed from Tears to the Always the Same Feeling series, tender gestures—such as picking a flower—expand into intimate emotional landscapes.
In a similar manner, Charlotte Niewenhuys, the gallery’s most recent resident, presents two embroideries created during her time at The Paddocks, drawn from her ongoing research into lintels (υπέρθυρα)—traditional architectural thresholds that speak to family ties, protection, and lineage. Memory and heritage also surface through an instinctive process in Lea Riggi’s embroideries combining new and found materials. Folkloric sensibilities occur in Katerina Karatzaferi’s embroidered soft sculptures, as well as in the wild, charming textile creature by Elina Niarchou, created on the island of Tinos. Likewise, Alexia Psaradeli draws from the folk tradition of forming tiles on women’s thighs, imprinting her ceramic works with floral traces and subtle bodily histories.
Narrative and observation appear in varied registers across the exhibition: Viktoria Nianiou’s serene paintings of sunsets and horses capture the suspended moment when the sun rises or sinks into the sea, balancing atmosphere with personal symbolism, while Korina Kamalakidou captures fleeting cityscape moments in her linocuts. Cyrus Mahboubian’s analogue photograph Horse, Hydra invites viewers to lean in, discovering a moment that appears almost by accident, as if glimpsed in passing.
Experimentation comes to the fore in the miniature works of Manolis Angelakis / tind, a master of silkscreen printing, who turns inward to push the boundaries of his craft, creating unique works with his fingerprint. Material traces shape the sculptural works of Katerina Giannitsi, which resemble imagined fossils of our time, that feel unearthed yet never recorded. Inspired by the natural world, TEFRA90’s paintings recall the forms of mushrooms, evoking shelter, roots, and a sense of home. Intimacy emerges differently in Lila Agrafioti’s miniature pencil drawing Έλα!, in which she reflects with humour on the duality of communication today, oscillating between closeness and distance.
Whether through intuitive gestures, playful forms, intricate textures, or subtle symbolism, each work in Small Tiny Worlds embodies a world of its own: introspective, precise, symbolic, intimate, contained yet expansive.
