Marking Kyritsopoulou's first solo show in London, Two Hands Holding One Arm brings together a new body of photographs, objects and text connecting formal considerations and magic tricks with a discussion about selfhood, anxiety and the messy business of living.

Amanda Kyritsopoulou (b.1989) is a Greek artist living and working in London. She completed her MA in Contemporary Fine Art Practice at the Royal Academy Schools, RA in 2021 and has showcased her work in the UK and internationally. Through a combination of photography, text, sculpture and time-based work, Amanda fabricates clusters of objects, expressing an attraction to everything that shapes everyday life for the anxious urbanite. Borrowing from the highs and lows of function, consumption, sport, DIY and with a trickster's approach to materiality, colour and display, her practice is an absurd reflection on the self and the world, the self in this world, this world in the self.

Text written by art historian and cultural theorist Dr. Mara Polgovsky.

If thoughts became objects, would they be flat or folded? Would we be able to touch them? Would they be heavy or would they fly? What ultimately is the relationship between forms of thinking and the objectual world? In Two Hands Holding One Arm, Amanda Kyritsopoulou choreographs relationships between sculptural objects, images, and the dynamics of the mind. She attends to the way in which thoughts fold time and the everyday, repeatedly returning to the significance of minutiae, which are never small or irrelevant in our perception.

Building upon Duchamp’s transvaluation of aesthetic values, Kyritsopoulou subverts the conceptualist treatment of art as idea (rational, organised, and often masculine) to posit ideas as intrinsically artful: in their serendipity, tendency towards drift, capacity to ‘emerge’. Obsessive, playful, impossible, and occasionally troubled (just like the mind), Kyritsopoulou’s art summons attention through its own attentive gestures, which mobilise a hyperrealist, yet ultimately humorous multiplication of ‘stuff’ via identical copies. The copy in Kyritsopoulou becomes a mechanism to empty the norm of normality.

There is also in her creative practice an intention to deceive, to trompe not just l’œil but also les mains. How much we’d like to fiddle with the creases of her Chestpress (2025) and open her Door,closed (2025), both of which are however immobile and flat. Do they belong to the body-cropping realm of magic, where sensibility is at once heightened and tricked, or are they a commentary on the flattening of a screen- laden world, in which appearance, truth and use are fundamentally delinked? Scattered among doors, tables, and garments, real and not, Kyritsopoulou’s language- infused art at once tricks and reenchants, reclaiming new ontic possibilities for the quotidian gadget.

Two Hands Holding One Arm is kindly supported by Knotenpunkt
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Knotenpunkt, founded by Isabelle Nowak in 2020, supports artists by encouraging dialogue, building community, and enabling research and production.Knotenpunkt hosts regular events to present artists' practices as Part of Playground while offering support and mentoring for the realisation of specific works through Propel. Knotenpunkt , German for intersection/junction/node, was born from its founder's passion and commitment for promoting multidisciplinary dialogue and bringing pertinent artistic projects to life.

For press inquiries, high-resolution images, or to arrange a preview, please contact Javier Calderon at javier@somersgallery.com.