Charamandas’s work explores the collapse between the physical body and natural landscapes. In her practice, she foregrounds the sensory and the tactile using various visual languages to convey the tensions between fragility and force, care and abuse, and beauty and brutality.

Her works explore liminality through their surreal resemblance to existing forms and shapes which appear isolated and detached from reality. Her paintings and smaller mixed-media works approach geographical landscapes as a series of physical bodies: a jagged coastline path which traces the extremities of an island, a gentle slope that leads to a smoking crater, or a body of water that divides continents enabling or inhibiting the flow of physical bodies. She interrogates the violence associated with otherwise beautiful topographies, aware of the invisible forces which have molded them. The Caldera or volcano crater recurs in her work as a symbol for forces that lay dormant until they reach boiling point, gradually allowing what is concealed to come to the surface.

Charamandas’s practice begins with a bodily, physical engagement through embodied outdoor research. Her palette is inspired by the natural pigments of the landscapes through which she walks. Through slow travel and the observation of minute cyclical changes, the artist adopts an ecofeminist worldview which challenges a prevalent system of speed and productivity. In her artistic gatherings, centered around food and community exchange, she invokes a politics of care and a practice of ‘nurturing’.

DIMITRA CHARAMANDAS (b. 1988) is Swiss-Greek artist working across painting, video, text, sculpture, and community gatherings. She completed an MA in Fine Arts at the Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel (2022) and previously studied at the Lucerne School of Art and Design and the Bern Academy of the Arts.

Recent solo and duo presentations include Tides, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, (2023); Little inlets, Helvetia Art Foyer Basel (2023); Body of Water, Body of Stone, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2022); Bassa Marea, Museo Castello San Materno, Ascona (2022) ; Fragility, Haus der Kunst St. Josef, Solothurn (2021); and An der Kante, Salon Mondial der Christoph Merian Stiftung, Münchenstein, Basel (2018). Significant group shows include Peace or Never, Institute Art Gender Nature, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz (2022); Unfrozen Education — Or how to Relearn, Rethymno, Crete (2019); and The lands we Know, Project Space Sfera, Athens (2018). Upcoming solos include a presentation at Helvetia Art Foyer, Basel (November 2022), at Ann Mazzotti Gallery, Basel (March, 2023), and at Kunstmuseum Solothurn (September, 2023).

Charamandas’s work is held in institutional and private collections across Switzerland. She lives and works between Basel, Solothurn and Athens.