Nicole Economides (b.1992) is an Athens based artist born in New York. She received her BA/BFA degree from the Department of Fine Arts and Arts Sciences at the University of Ioannina Greece (2015). She is currently a graduate MFA Fine Arts student at Parsons, The New School. Economides has been an artist in residence at the Agora Collective: WHILE WE WORK in Berlin, Germany (2016) and at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece (2014). She was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Scholarship for Painters (2017) and the Artists’ Grant from Gerondelis Foundation Inc (2018). She has shown her work in many group exhibitions and workshops in Crete, Ioannina, Athens, Thessaloniki, Paris, Berlin and New York City. She currently lives and works in New York City.
Economides’ work reflects on the appropriation of Greek antiquity in Western culture and it’s romanticization throughout art history. By merging elements of the semiotic system in painting: symbols, icons and indexes; she questions narratives of the existing hierarchical systems within the cultural capital. Writing in Greek letters and juxtaposing tracings of polaroid pictures, her painting-installations invite the viewer to decipher the content of her work and to inevitably project their desires on it. Economides explores her own liminal typology on canvas, which obscures the lines between Greece and the West and questions the ownership of history.