Antoinetta Angelidi has painted obsessively since she was a child. In her words, painting for her is a place of concentration and salvation. As she heads for adolescence, the art books her father gives her come to mark her way. Painting, the most silent of the visual arts, gives her discourse a new voice. This dialogue with painting has been a component of her work ever since.

During this same period when the art books she is given by her father cultivate her artistic gaze, she paints her mother’s naked body with its hidden secrets. And not only that: She paints the ‘rotten life’ which, alongside that other life, the still or dead life (nature morte) of academic painting, vies for a locus of decay within and beyond the person. She paints cobwebs, which have this to teach: the secretions of a barely-there body are strong enough to lay traps for stronger prey. In this way, the microcosm undermines the certainty of the macrocosm. Or, more correctly, it reminds us that ‘the random can be a powerful compositional principle’.

These first drawings have not survived. Which is true, too, of a good many of her later works: like the photo series of a naked pregnant woman doing housework, made in 1978, a year after her return to Greece, which so shocked the organisers of the left-wing youth organisation festival it was intended for that they refused to accept it. Equally lost is a work she made with menstrual pads and tights in the context of a subsequent feminist action. ‘We didn’t believe in archives then. There was only the here and now!’, she says. It is true that the 60s, 70s and 80s didn’t seek to cocoon memories spider-like in archives; they were lived instead for their own expanded present.