For his first solo exhibition with Galerie Judin, the young painter Kiriakos Tompolidis decided to unfurl his family album. He invites us to follow the footsteps of his Greek grandparents, who left their homeland to find a better life in Germany. Both they and his parents after them sought to adapt to their new surroundings, to blend in as seamlessly as possible. For the following generation, that of Tompolidis and his sister, there was a certain distance; a gap that raised questions about belonging, home and cultural identity. All his family members and their contrasting attitudes are featured in the works of this exhibition, including himself. They are about life between two “worlds”, as Tompolidis describes it, an in-between space that the young painter explores in his 16 paintings. But while the prevailing theme is indeed family and cohesion, almost all the figures are depicted as solitary. They are left to their own devices, alone with their hopes and fears. This loneliness and melancholy pervades his work.

From sunny Greece, Tompolidis’ grandparents moved to Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr, in the 1960s. They came as so-called “guest workers”, who were expected and intended to move back to their home country in due time. They ended up staying, as so many others did. Since the beginning of his artistic career, Tompolidis has been preoccupied with what this relationship between guest and citizen, between Greece and Germany, meant for his family. In his practice, he interweaves the contingencies, aspirations, experiences, and physical objects of three generations. A portrait of his sister clashes with his parents’ ordeals – set against the space-age 70s wallpaper of his grandparents.

Wallpaper, carpets, patterns and textiles play a key role in Tompolidis’ compositions as symbols of home, homeland and cultural context. Much like carpets and textiles are the product of interlacing threads, Tompolidis frequently fuses printed paper with canvas using a specific imaging process by means of chemical treatment – a formula he doesn’t ever reveal. The motifs burn themselves into the canvas while the paper dissolves. And so, most of the wallpapers that emerge in his paintings were once, in fact, genuine wallpapers. Picturing them without a brush, as it were, highlights his particular interest in physical things. To complete the young painter’s alphabet, these tangible objects build symbolic bridges from his parents’ heritage to the treatment of homosexuality in ancient Greece and the post-war reality of his grandparents. The figurative and haptic are ultimately also expressed in his painting style: Most of Tompolidis’ paintings are rich and layered, the paint applied impasto, usually with his fingers, almost massaging the paint into the canvas.