"THE PRETEXT OF PAINTING": VARIATIONS ON THE COLLECTION OF IVI MELEAGROU
26 October – 22 November 2025
Limassol Municipal Arts Centre — Apothikes Papadaki
Conceived through a dialogue between Christodoulos Panayiotou and Androula Kafa, curator Evagoras Vanezis, and architect Eleonora Antoniadou
Presented by The Island Club in the framework of the Art Explora Festival Limassol
“the pretext of painting”: Variations on the Collection of Ivi Meleagrou invites visitors into the personal art collection of seminal Cypriot author, Ivi Meleagrou (1928–2019), once housed in her family home in Agios Andreas, Nicosia. Featuring paintings by key Cypriot artists from the 1960s to the 1980s together with sculptures, prints, reproductions, and embroideries, the collection reflects Meleagrou’s deep affinities with other artists and intellectuals of her time, while also revealing her highly idiosyncratic relationship to the visual arts and collecting: fluid, non-hierarchical, intuitive, and moving freely across the divide between originals and reproductions. The exhibition is shaped by an experimental dramaturgy and unfolds through a dynamic process: visitors choose works from a catalogued list to be retrieved, displayed, and taken back into the storage station, generating a display in constant flux.
Ivi Meleagrou (Nicosia, 1928–2019) stands amongst the most important novelists of Cypriot literature, and is a pioneer in renewing prose writing. She was a founding member and editor-in-chief of the periodical Kypriaka Chronika (1960–1972), collaborated with newspapers, and was also the first announcer of the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation. For her novel, Eastern Mediterranean (1969), she was awarded the State Prize for Fiction, while its sequel, Penultimate Season, was distinguished in Cyprus (1982) as well as in Greece (1983). Alongside her literary work, she developed an active political and social engagement as president of the Central Committee of Women’s Organizations after 1974, with a presence in Cyprus and abroad on issues of occupation, displacement, and women’s rights. In 2014, she was honored with the G.P. Pierides Prize for her overall contribution to literature.