Marigo Kassi is a distinguished Greek visual artist whose practice examines femininity through deeply personal and socially charged narratives. Across her paintings, sculptural installations, and mixed-media pieces, she brings attention to the emotional, historical, and symbolic weight carried by women. She delves deeply into the intimate and often hidden aspects of feminine experience, creating works that intertwine memories, wounds, expectations, and quiet strengths.
Kassi consistently examines the complex emotional landscapes of women—motherhood, memory, trauma, and the interplay of vulnerability and resilience. Her work is simultaneously autobiographical and universal, bridging personal experience with collective reflections on womanhood, social norms, and domestic ritual. In her latest exhibition, Armoire au Féminin, the wardrobe becomes a powerful symbol of intimate histories and hidden truths. A familiar, everyday object — yet also a vessel of memories, emotions, and secrets — the wardrobe assumes multilayered meanings.
Marigo Kassi was born in Athens in 1953. She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1972-1078). She spent a year in Paris (1978–1979) and later, from 1989 to 1992, pursued postgraduate studies in painting with a scholarship from the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY). Since 1988, she has been teaching visual arts at Vakalo College of Art and Design, where she is oversees the visual arts department. She is also a founding member of the Indoors group. Kassi has held fifteen solo exhibitions, three duo exhibitions, and has participated in numerous group shows both in Greece and abroad. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections in Greece, France, Switzerland, Cyprus, and the United States. She lives and works in Athens.
In an interview with Greek News Agenda*, Marigo Kassi reflects on the origins of her themes and how material, color, and process shape her world. She discusses the significance of the wardrobe and the red dress, and the expressive tension between vulnerability and resilience that threads through her materials. She reflects on how her themes emerged, why materials matter so deeply in her process, and how fragility and force coexist in her work.
For many years, femininity has been a recurring theme in your work. How did this choice emerge? Which aspects concern you most?
I began exploring women’s issues in the 1990s. It started with a group exhibition in Ioannina dedicated to the unjust drowning of Kyra Frosyni and sixteen women by Ali Pasha during the Ottoman era. This was followed by my solo exhibition Hydromones in 1996, centered on the same subject. From that point on, my themes—beyond the personal, which they already were (for example, Tightrope Walker, Inner Space, 1990)—revolved in one way or another around distinctly female matters.
These include a woman’s place in society, the stereotypes we grow up with, family dynamics, motherhood, memories, successes, traumas, acceptance, loss, pain, and abuse. Representative exhibitions include After the Goodbye (1997), You Look Wonderful (2002), Two X (2009), From Rags (2017), and, most recently Armoire au Féminin (2025).
Throughout my work, the materials themselves also carry these themes—illuminated pieces like The Little Girl Who Runs (2005–2016), and crocheted sculptural works such as The Skin and The Conversation (2012–2019). Manual labor and lived experience are central to my practice. I use a wide range of materials: traditional oils, but also glass, seaweed, pine needles, sand, and newspapers.
A woman’s position in society, the stereotypes with which we are raised, family relationships, motherhood, but also memories, achievements, traumas, acceptance, loss, pain, abuse. Indicative exhibitions include: After the Goodbye (1997), You Look Wonderful (2002), Two X (2009), From Rags (2017), and of course, the most recent one, Armoire au Féminin (2025).
In between, many of my works support women’s themes through both content and the use of materials and symbols—such as The Little Girl Who Runs (2005–2016) in illuminated works, The Skin and The Conversation (2012–2019), sculptural pieces crocheted by hand. Manual labor as a practice, together with lived experience as a source of inspiration, is very important in my work. Throughout my career, I have used many different materials—classic oils in painting, but also glass, seaweed, pine needles, sand, and newspapers.
At the center of your latest exhibition stands the wardrobe. What does this familiar object symbolize, reveal, and conceal? And how about the worn red dress that echoes your earlier work?
In this installation, created by me as visual artist and composer Andrea Cohen, the idea revolves around the wardrobe as a feminine symbol. In reality, the wardrobe represents the place where underwear, clothing, and personal items are neatly stored and hidden—objects that may conceal deep secrets. In dreams, however, it appears as a maternal and protective figure, as well as a female body.
Thus, as women artists, we considered this object—with its multilayered meanings and uses—to be a representation and extension of ourselves. The wardrobe is a place where memory settles. The wardrobe is a sanctuary—a place of order—holding everything we hide: underwear, memories, deaths… half-forgotten things. If you lift an object that has sat inside a wardrobe for years, you see its traces left in the dust. In the same way, the traces of the things we have kept inside ourselves remain.
The red dress is a remnant of the clothes inside the wardrobe—a reminder of an earlier installation work with 250 paper dresses hanging from the ceiling (Exhibitions: Emergences–Realities, Cutting–Sewing (2005). The dress is red like blood—a color that dominates Armoire au Féminin, just as blood dominates a woman’s life.
What is the purpose of dismantling the wardrobe?
In TWO X (2009), 17 women’s stories were visualized inside small wardrobe–dollhouse structures with light. In Armoire au Féminin (2025), a life-size wardrobe, echoing my own personal statement, is deconstructed.
The doors open, the back and sides are removed; it stands on metal supports, and remains open in the space with only a few elements inside. I create a sculptural installation, surrounded by mixed–media works. Sounds composed by Andrea Cohen remind us of the wardrobe’s use: the creaking of the doors, keys, forest air, as well as everyday sounds that connect us to the outside world.
Sensitivity and harshness are both characteristics of femininity. How is this duality expressed in your work?
Through material and color. The delicate, handmade translucent papers and the gauze supporting them evoke fragility, tenderness, sensitivity. Yet the torn edges, the stitching, and the blood-red hues convey violence and harshness—something wounded and reassembled with red, gold, or silver seams.
In your work, the female psyche is tormented, crumpled, transformed. How is this reflected in the way you work with your materials?
As I mentioned previously, the material undergoes an intense process in my hands. I color, wax, iron, tear, and sew the thin handmade papers to reach the desired result. And yet this fragile, almost translucent material endures!
It reminds me of human nature. A newborn—tender and fragile—will experience many difficult things over the course of its life. And through all these hardships, it will endure.
*Interview by Dora Trogadi
