Kostis Damoulakis "Jamer" (1986) - Context Window 2 (Geeking)

Artist name: Kostis Damoulakis (Jamer)
Nationality: Greek

Date of birth: 1986, Athens, Greece

Title of the work: Context Window 2 (Geeking)
Year: 2025

Technique: Mixed media on canvas

Dimensions: 100 cm x 90 cm

Framing: Yes

Details of the signature:
Hand-signed by the artist

Edition:
Unique work (no numbering, original piece).

Provenance:
Work directly from the artist’s studio, Kostis Damoulakis. The work is for sale with a certificate of authenticity issued by the agency representing the artist, MP ARTS AGENCY.

Documentation:
Certificate of authenticity issued by MP ARTS AGENCY.

Condition:
The artwork is in perfect condition, with no notable imperfections.

Delivery:
The work will be shipped from Greece, carefully packaged. It will be shipped framed, with insured delivery.

About the work:

This work originates from a collaborative trilogy that unfolds across three distinct yet interconnected production strata, forming a multilayered trajectory from the material to the immaterial. At its base lies the primordial gesture of oil painting, where the tactile act of manual creation functions as a performative reference to the historicity of painting. Framed by structures designed from digital gestures and materialized through the mechanical work of 3D printing, the materiality transforms, extending the traditional notion of manual creation into a techno-industrial production regime.

The third layer introduces the dematerialized dimension of the digital. The image, arising from algorithmic processes, moves away from the physical gesture and shifts into a purely computational field, where creation is no longer mediated by the hand but by the autonomy of code, while it is evoked through the contemporary performative equivalent of the act of speech: the prompt. The thus-substantiated image returns to nourish the materiality of the pictorial gesture, completing a total cycle, an ouroboros.

The iconography draws from the history of painting, reassembled through a surrealist prism that redefines its potential for representation. These “materialized gestures” operate at the boundary between the real and the imaginary, highlighting the multiplicity of materialities and their dynamic coexistence.

Integrated screens introduce a performative and evolving element: in real time, the growth of cells is simulated through Conway’s Game of Life, an early algorithmic system considered a precursor to artificial intelligence and a hallmark example of cellular automata. The biological process itself thus becomes an aesthetic event, reconfiguring the act of creation as a form of simulated culture.

About the artist:

Kostis Damoulakis is a Greek visual artist who lives and works in Athens. A graduate of the School of Fine Arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, over the past twenty years he has developed an artistic practice deeply influenced by his involvement in graffiti and tattooing, two disciplines that have left a lasting mark on his visual language, references, and the very structure of his works.

Primarily using painting as his medium, he composes decidedly contemporary works that draw their symbols from different artistic movements, cultures, and eras. His work explores urban everyday life by placing the human body at the center of the composition, giving rise to a form of poetry of the banal and the ordinary. Through moving figures, street scenes, and suspended moments, he captures the rhythms of city life and the discreet emotions that run through it.

His works are now in private collections in Greece and internationally, while his murals are visible in many cities around the world. He has shown his work in several solo exhibitions, notably at PET Projects (Athens), Neo Cosmos – Laboratory for the Urban Commons, Montana Gallery Barcelona (Spain), and Lola Nikolaou Gallery in Thessaloniki.

He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in major institutions and art spaces, including the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hellenic Cosmos Cultural Centre, a.antonopoulou.art gallery, the Athens School of Fine Arts, and the Art-Thessaloniki International Art Fair (2018).

In 2022, he received the ARTWORKS award and became a fellow of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation artist support program, a recognition of his important contribution to the Greek contemporary art scene.

Under the pseudonym Jamer, he also pursues a practice related to urban space. In 2024, he presented Urban Life, his first solo exhibition on the island of Syros. Through bold forms, vivid colors, and poetic realism, this series portrays urban dwellers in motion, at rest, or in reflection, paying homage to daily life and the deeply human dimension of the urban experience.

Between studio painting and mural interventions, Kostis Damoulakis thus develops a sensitive and contemporary body of work, at the crossroads of street art and modern figuration, where the body, the city, and ordinary lived experience become the central elements of a visual narrative firmly anchored in his time.