Three openings, 1996

Οpy Zouni was born and grew up in Cairo, where she received her first lessons in painting, while in 1963, after settling in Athens, she studied at the School of Fine Arts. A prolific painter, in Greece and abroad, she has created an oeuvre which has its roots both in Egypt and in Greece - countries where geometry and abstract mathematical thought, respectively, were born - as well as in modern approaches to art with which she became acquainted on her many trips abroad. The observation of nature, the specific features of visible reality - the sea, the desert, the sky, and the contemporary environment - space generally, and the transferring of it on to the plane of the picture have formed an object of experimentations and study for this artist. By means of solely representational means and a few colours, together with black and white, in conjunction with horizontal and vertical lines, she exalts nature to a level of universal harmony in which the quest for the essence of the idea, through constant abstraction and simplification, predominates. With the aid of geometry and mathematical reasoning, she systematises her thought, and is thus led to the point of illusion, while the absence of the human element extends the boundlessness of the infinite.