Bia Davou
Bia Davou (1932-1996, Athens) produced serial works in a broad range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing and weaving. The Serial Structures (1978) series includes drawings—a selection of which is presented here—produced by applying dots to a page, following a mathematical system of permutations. Sail – Odyssey (1982) is part of a series inspired by the Odyssey (c. 8th century BC) an ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer. Davou copied Homer’s verses, reinterpreting them in the form of an abstract geometric alphabet. From one work to the next, the signs are rearranged according to her own sequential logic. The work presented here displays this within a woven textile, which unfurls in space like a sail. The artist stated that ‘The perpetuation of Serial Structures can be performed by anyone or begin and progress from all together, as long as there is a given system, a rule, that will associate the sequences and allow the recent ones to be generated from the previous ones.’