Maria Georgoula's 'Pom pom expedition' explores middle-class softness through surreal objects

Maria Georgoula's exhibition 'Pom pom expedition', guest-curated by the collective Radical Reading, presents an investigation into notions of softness through suburban middle-class aesthetics. The show features works like 'Βατία / Vatía' (2015), three white gazebos occupying the ground floor under creamy lighting. On walls nearby, 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' (2014) displays tableaux covered in amorphous plaster forms, referencing Eugène Ionesco's 1950 play 'The Bald Soprano'. A tall banner-like sculpture called 'Φλάμπουρο / Banner' (2015) topped with an avocado alludes to traditional Greek wedding customs. The basement contains a built-in cage with two noisy fans embedded in walls, housing a long pole covered in furry fiberglass that protrudes inside the gated space. Within this cage rests 'Pad' (2015), a plaster-covered box beside a pair of slippers evoking apathetic hotel television moments. Two rumpled 'Pom pom' (2015) sculptures made from beaded taxi driver seat covers occupy another room section. Georgoula's work employs surrealism and absurdism references thinned to formalism, using visual and tactile vocabularies to distill everyday banality. The exhibition originally appeared in May 2015, questioning what surreal and absurd elements reveal about twenty-first-century middle-class psyche through fluffy objects and plaster globs.