By far the best private view invitation (to my mind at least) is to the annual exhibition of contemporary art at Hydra Workshop, the Karpidas family’s exhibition space on the idyllic Greek island of Hydra. Here, for the past 17 years, a new show is unveiled at the beginning of every summer in this modest but generously proportioned former boat builder’s workshop. A sybaritic long weekend then ensues, with the art world clan gathering, presided over with legendary generosity by Pauline Karpidas and her son Panos and organised with quiet efficiency by Sadie Coles and Pauline Daly.
This year, the artist was the New York-based painter Nicole Eisenman who, following on from her recent New Museum survey, was showing a clutch of her forceful figures to a crowd that included the Royal Academy’s Tim Marlow, Frieze co-editor Jennifer Higgie, National Portrait Gallery director Nicholas Cullinan, the Steidlich’s Beatrix Ruf and Manchester Museum and Galleries power couple Nicholas Merriman and Maria Balshaw. Along with more recent renditions of a huddled, purple, bug-eyed insomniac and—my favourite—a fabulously elemental mask-faced Northern California Potter Woman (2015), works on show included Divers (1998), an earlier canvas depicting plunging, libidinously intertwined female swimmers.
These agile aquatic females provided an appropriate motif for the weekend. Although (most) of the guests did not indulge in more frolicsome antics, the lure of the Aegean always means that pretty much the entire Hydra weekend is spent either in or beside the sea. And this time, there was more watery activity than ever—albeit of a more aesthetic nature—with the independent installation by the enterprising art duo Mathieu Goussin and Hortense Le Calvez (aka forlane 6 studio), of an underwater artwork floating just above the seabed off Vlichos Beach. Apparently representing “a sunken village on stilts fragmenting itself”, the piece also proved highly popular with many of the guests on account of its marker buoy providing a good spot to aim for on their post-prandial swims. Art Ahoy!
