DeAnna Maganias, who lives and works in Athens and New York, presents a collection of sculpture, painting and video in her first U.S solo exhibition, “The View From Bed”.

Strongly influenced by architecture and minimalist form, Maganias explores the more disconcerting and alienating aspects of urban reality through a voyeuristic filter. The industrial form and mechanized precision implicit in her work, however, upon closer inspection is found to be meticulously and obsessively executed by hand.

In this exhibition’s name-sake piece, “The View From Bed”, (the title having been derived from “The View From Nowhere” by Thomas Nagel), Maganias constructed a pared-down, inverted scale model of her studio’s bedroom, complete with four walls, ceiling and floor. The access point for the viewer into this uninhabited, monastic dwelling is the volume of the bed, which has been isolated and removed. While the simplicity and self-evident nature of this boxed-in, architectural environment might normally provide the viewer with a removed experience; placing the vantage point at the artist’s abdicated position pushes us into a unique stance wherein an objective viewing experience is directed to the subjective position of someone else.

“Sutton Place South : Master Bath, Guest-bath and Trash-room” are three separate acrylic on canvas works that are shaped to the exact dimensions of the rooms they are named for. The white and grey paint has been repetitively applied and sanded to build an obsessive imitation in which control leads to seductive perfection. We are confronted with fetishized works that point out the degree to which we have internalized our physical relationship to the space around us.

”The Citicorp Building, Sunset”, is a twenty-three minute video, shot in real time, of the building in New York, illuminated by the setting sun. The glass façade reflects the adjacent presence of the East River’s undulating surface like a watery mirror. The static, solid structure of the building is dematerialized by its glimmering façade. The title of the video refers to the painting, “The House of Parliament, Sunset” by Claude Monet. The hazy pastels of the setting sun and the watery presence of The River Thames render the solid and monumental piece of architecture ethereal.

Maganias has shown with Rebecca Camhi, Athens; Marco, Rome; MARTa Herford, Germany; in the Prague Biennale 2005, and the Istanbul Biennal 2003, amongst others. In 1999, she won the 1st Deste Prize, Deste Foundation, Athens.