The Bernier/Eliades Gallery recently hosted Antrea Tzourovits’ first solo exhibition with the gallery in Athens, titled “Empty Hums”. Tzourovits is a visual artist whose primary focus is sculpture and installation. His practice centers on the exploration of materiality, structure, and corporeality through works that activate space as an experiential field.
Antrea Tzourovits
portrait
2026
Photo during the installation of the show “Empty Hums” at the Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens.
Courtesy of the artist
What was the trigger that led to Empty Hums?
There was no specific trigger in the sense of an event. It was more an accumulation of small internal shifts around issues that have been preoccupying me for a while. I started working without any particular plan, mainly to think about them, and without realizing it, a whispered conversation began to form between the works. Empty Hums emerged as a way to keep that whisper open, without closing it in a narrative.
What unites and differentiates Empty Hums from your previous body of work?
There is a continuity in the relationship with materials, gesture and the idea of memory that things carry, what changes is the tone. The previous works had more recognizable points of reference, while here things become more introspective and less “explainable” in words. In this work I want the works to suggest situations rather than describe them or be articulated as statements.
Antrea TZOUROVITS
Just There, 2026
Padauk wood, Bolivian rosewood, Indian rosewood, horse hair used for cello bows, varnish
135 x 38 x 14 cm
2026 © Photography Boris Kirpotin, February 2026 Athens, Greece
How does manual work go hand in hand with personal experience and memory? And how is this reflected in your work?
Manual work is already a form of memory. Contact with materials and the sense of touch are among the strongest senses, although in art we often consider vision to be dominant. My body and the materials I use remember movements, resistances, times and rhythms. These are difficult to articulate in thought and speech. One can only feel them or not. In this exhibition there is an attempt to hide the gesture and at the same time keep it present, as something that persists below the surface. The materials I use carry a past life and a physical memory, something that permeates the work not as a reference, but more as an underground structure.
“The word Hums does not refer to a sound, but to an in-between state of uncertainty, full of possibilities.” How is this uncertainty created through such a material process?
Materiality gives the illusion of stability, but for me it is the opposite. Every material carries, in addition to memories and references, also unpredictable behaviors and resistances. Uncertainty arises when I let these materials guide the process rather than fully control them. It is not easy, because there is always the need for control and clarity. In this series there are works that even I cannot fully explain or control, and this gives me space to discover aspects of them that I could not have planned in advance.
Antrea TZOUROVITS
Untitled, part of Edges Between Breaths Series, 2025
Acrylic on sculpted walnut wood, varnish
30 x 44,5 x 3,5 cm
2026 © Photography Boris Kirpotin, February 2026 Athens, Greece
About the artist
Antrea Tzourovits (b. 1987, Montenegro) lives and works in London. He received an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London (2022), as a NEON fellow, and holds a degree from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2020). His work has received significant distinctions, including the Kenneth Armitage Foundation Postgraduate Sculptor Prize, the UCL East Provost’s Art Prize, and the Hari Art Prize in 2022. In the same year, he was awarded a fellowship by ARTWORKS of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Tzourovits has presented his work in solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad, while recent group exhibitions include 5-7-5 (Athens, 2025) with ARTFLYER, Space of Togetherness (Athens, 2024), organised by NEON and curated by Elina Koundouri, and My Dreams Were Dashed Against Your Walls (Chios, 2024), by DEO Projects and curated by Akis Kokkinos.
Portrait of Antrea Tzourovits
Photo: Evie Milsom
