Bia Davou

Davou studied painting in Kostas Iliadis’s workshop from 1952 to 1958 and later assisted with teaching there. She held her first solo exhibition at Nees Morfes in Athens in 1960. Her early paintings moved towards abstraction, with close attention to how marks and colour organised a surface. By the late 1960s she was exploring three-dimensional constructions and environments, broadening the materials and spaces through which a work could develop.

During the 1970s, questions of communication led her towards mathematical notation and ideas associated with computing and cybernetics. She developed what she called serial structures, using numerical relationships to organise marks and forms. The patient act of drawing or stitching remained central to this research. Her association with the Desmos gallery included solo exhibitions in 1974, 1978, 1981, 1983 and 1990, marking important stages in her practice. In the early 1980s, references to Homer’s Odyssey and the figure of Penelope strengthened the poetic dimension. Davou died in Athens in 1996. A major EMST retrospective in 2008–2009 brought her successive investigations together. Her career shows an artist repeatedly testing the relation between an organising rule, the hand that carries it out and the meanings that emerge.

The Grids series of 1967–1970 used materials including transparent plastic sheets to examine how layers could organise space. Binary Contrast (1978), an acrylic painting in the National Gallery, belongs to a later engagement with numerical relationships. Serial Structures 2 – Odyssey (1978–1981), represented in the EMST collection by drawings on graph paper, connects binary notation and Fibonacci sequences with the transcription and transformation of Homeric verse.

Her engagement with numbers was part of artistic communication. Black and white dots, repeated marks and geometric arrangements became a visual vocabulary, while the time required to make them remained visible. The move into fabric brought writing and thread into relation. Sails (1981–1982) used cloth and triangular forms to connect serial construction with journeys and the poetic world of the Odyssey. The work was later presented posthumously at documenta 14 in 2017. Serial de/re-structures (1992) comprises 367 drawings, extending research through a sustained sequence of changes. Across these works, systematic organisation and individual manual decisions remain intertwined. The artist’s short statement about research helps explain the importance of trying, repeating and revising within her practice.

Davou’s work offers a meeting point between conceptual art, manual making and poetic language. Museum collections and the EMST retrospective preserve drawings and constructions through which that development can be studied. Her use of the Odyssey also invites attention to how a text can become a visual structure.

Read the graded passage and draw two rows of dots. Count them in Greek, then write which has περισσότερες and which λιγότερες. Repeat a small shape and describe what stays the same. Use γραμμή and σειρά in two sentences about your drawing, then explain νήμα from the passage. This B1 activity practises supported Modern Greek comparison and description. The mathematical systems and ancient Homeric text remain subjects to explore with further guidance.

• She trained in Kostas Iliadis’s painting workshop.
• Her serial structures combine numerical rules and manual work.
• Sails was presented posthumously at documenta 14.