Kore: Georgia Sagri at The Breeder

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This spring, a new body of work unfolds under the title Kore—a quietly powerful exhibition that invites viewers into an exploration of perception, healing, and the layered symbolism of the feminine form. Drawing from myth, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and lived experience, the artist presents a constellation of works that challenge the eye to slow down, to stay present, and to encounter not just images—but states of becoming.

Kore is a word charged with meanings. In Greek, it is the daughter. In classical sculpture, it is the freestanding maiden. In the anatomy of the eye, it is the pupil—the gateway to sight and insight. Each of these associations weaves through the exhibition, enriching the visual field with both personal and archetypal resonance. The works, many of them in mirrored or doubled forms, function as self-portraits—not of a fixed identity, but of emotional and perceptual conditions in flux.

The artist speaks of “optic fever”—a term coined to describe the overstimulation of the contemporary gaze, bombarded by screens and speed, detached from intimacy, depth, or care. Against this fevered disembodiment, Kore proposes slowness. It is an invitation to recover a form of seeing that is sensate, embodied, and relational.

Doubleness is a recurring structure in the show—paired works that echo or interrupt one another, that unsettle and reframe. The eye hovers between them, drawn into a space of uncertainty and attention. These visual pairings nod to the uncanny, to the existential mirror of Dostoevsky’s Double, and to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of vision as always already split: to see is also to be seen.

Yet beyond philosophical inquiry, the exhibition is deeply mythic. The figure of Kore—daughter, pupil, soul—evokes the ancient story of Persephone and Demeter, a myth that pulses with generational longing, rupture, and return. In that cyclical movement between light and darkness, life and barrenness, the artist finds a metaphor for recovery: not a linear process, but a spiraling dance between loss, remembrance, and regeneration. The absent father—silent, elusive, emotionally peripheral—becomes a structural force whose presence is felt most in his distance.

Each work in Kore is shaped by the artist’s long-standing IASI (healing) practice, developed over a decade of intimate, one-on-one sessions across Athens, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. This history of listening, breathwork, and bodily awareness breathes through the pieces—not as illustration, but as presence. These are paintings that listen back, images that hold space rather than fill it.

Ultimately, Kore is not a spectacle but a sanctuary. It is a space to pause, to feel, to remember what it means to see—and to be seen—with care.

Find Sagri at The Breeder at 45 Iasonos st, 10436, Athens | https://thebreedersystem.com/