“Objects of Desire” consists of crocheted sculptures portraying male and female body parts closely linked with desire and pleasure.

Produced in a medium typically associated with feminine domestic handicraft, “Objects of Desire” belong to a tradition which blends together a surrealist hybridization of the object and the feminist re-appropriation of gendered activities, a tradition that seeks to reclaim the female body and its power over the poetics of desire.

In this tradition, stretching from Meret Oppenheim to Louise Bourgeois to Rosemarie Trockel, the erotic body is remolded in soft handcrafted forms that are uncanny and soothing, just as soft hand-woven toys are soothingly reminiscent of early childhood.

What used to be the object of Vaxevanidou’s drawings – the body and its materiality, its gratifications and sufferings – is now transmitted through the sensation of manual craft, its sensibility transformed from declaration to synaesthesia.

Thus “Objects of desire” can be said to have two meanings; they are objects of the body that desire aims for and they are objects of art that desire gives birth to.

Theophilos Tramboulis Curator/Writer/Editor – Athens