COSMIC SPECTRUM
An exhibition on the transformative experience of light
sparks a dialogue between precious jewelry and the visual arts.
Opening: Friday, November 28, 6-9 PM
Duration: 28.11.2025 – 31.1.2026
Curated by Vicky Tsirou
Participating artists: Natalia Manta, Marina Papadaki, Euripides Papadopetrakis
Focusing on light as a cosmic and transformative force, the Eleni Marneri Gallery presents on Friday, November 28, the exhibition Cosmic Spectrum, curated by art historian Vicky Tsirou.
Taking as a starting point the collection of precious jewelry that Eleni Marneri has developed over a forty-year journey, three contemporary artists explore the inexhaustible field of the delicate art of jewelry. Through new paintings and prints, sculptures, and site-specific video installations, visual artists Natalia Manta, Marina Papadaki, and Euripides Papadopetrakis unravel the thread of new stories around the concept of light as a vessel of an aesthetic, cognitive, cosmogonic, and ultimately elevating experience.
Cosmic Spectrum unfolds across a field of luminous frequencies and allegorical narratives, where exquisitely cut crystals and minerals activate a reciprocal relationship between high jewelry and contemporary visual creation. The role of light emerges as life-giving when it reveals new information about what is already familiar to us:
The light is shattered into gold on every cloud, my darling,
and it scatters gems in profusion[1]
With this lyrical metaphor, the Bengali Nobel laureate writer, Rabindranath Tagore, celebrates the ability of light and nature to offer abundance, multiplicity, and heterogeneity. The sun-drenched universe of gold and gemstones that emerges in Tagore’s poem “Light,” written in 1910, inhabits the neoclassical building with eclectic elements that now houses the gallery— a building which, more or less coincidentally, was erected in the very same year.
The works of the exhibition draw inspiration from the reflections, prismatic mirages, luster, and symbolism of precious stones and metals, as well as from their capacity, as natural materials, to record on their surface—spectrally—the evolution and trajectory of the world. After all, the semantic multiplicity of the Greek word for “world”, kosmos, in the ancient Greek language ranges from propriety and harmony to adornment, the universe, and the celestial firmament.
On the façade of the neoclassical building stands Marina Papadaki’s site-specific installation “Emerging Into the Sun”. In her work—evoking the form of a flag—the artist transcribes a unique piece from the collection, featuring white gold, brown diamonds, milky quartz, and red garnet. Beneath this new sun, two fledglings transform into guardians of change, heralding the arrival of a new era of light.
In Orphic, Egyptian, and Chinese mythology, the origin of the universe unfolds through the cosmic egg. According to one such Taoist legend, the god Pangu (Pan Gu, 盤古) was incubated within an egg, and upon emerging from it, split it into sky and earth. Marina Papadaki’s painting “ The Birth” refers to the moment just before such a cosmogony.
Euripides Papadopetrakis draws inspiration from the pearls of the precious collection and creates a new woodcut with gold foil printing. The print, titled “Luminescence,” depicts a shell at the threshold of revealing the smooth and radiant casing of its precious interior. The shell, once a symbol of beauty, transforms into a protective shield and a symbol of secrecy, leaving only a minimal slit through which diffuse iridescent beams of light and pulsating reflections escape. In the same spectrum, the artist “encases” this narrative within a readymade lightbox.
The notion of the protected shell shapes Natalia Manta’s multimedia video installation, “The Womb of Floating Dreams”. The artist studies selected pieces from the precious collection and draws her visual material from their distinctive patterns, engravings, and refractions. Using these elements as archetypal symbols, she creates a multisensory universe of cosmic information, where gems and crystals merge with planetary bodies, and the collection’s jewels become incandescent stars. The work evokes a nest, a womb, or a cave, within which fluid forms are projected, surrounded by off-white ceramic sculptures. Together, they compose an entire cosmic map—an embrace for the search of inner light—experienced through the chromatic spectrum.
Cosmic Spectrum marks, for the Eleni Marneri Gallery, the beginning of a new program that will unfold over the course of 2026, aiming to bring visual art closer to the wearable art of jewelry.
The exhibition is accompanied by two guided tours on Saturday, December 13, and, January 17, at 12 p.m., as well as by a specially curated music playlist by the exhibition curator, Vicky Tsirou.
Listen to Cosmic Spectrum here: Cosmic Spectrum Playlist
[1] The verse belongs to the poem Light (1910) and the poetry collection Gitanjali (1913) by Rabindranath Tagore.
Share more about the exhibition using the hashtags: #CosmicSpectrum #EleniMarneriGallery
Information:
Opening: November 28, 2025, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Duration: November 28, 2025 – January 31, 2026
Guided tours: Saturday, 13.12.2025 and 17.01.2026 at 12 p.m.
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 10:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m., Saturday 10:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.
