Ioanna Limniou

"Road Trip"

Road Trip is the first solo exhibition of Greek artist Ioanna Limniou at Swivel Gallery and her first major presentation in the United States. Bringing together a series of new oil paintings, the show introduces a painter who looks closely and remembers deeply. Limniou is a storyteller, an attentive observer of place, working with clarity, warmth, and a keen sense of time.

December 13th - January 17th, 2025

555 Greenwich Street, New York City

Her point of departure is Evros, the northern frontier of Greece where she grew up. Fields, riverbanks, and border roads recur across her canvases, as do the people who inhabit them: walkers and workers, families at tables, friends in motion. Limniou maps this terrain tenderly, noting how each return rewrites her connection to it. Memory becomes a method. The self-portrait AXD 2003 reaches back twenty-two years, situating the artist inside the narrative and the outlook it formed. 

Limniou balances research and intuition, moving between artistic and anthropological attention. She carries Polaroids like souvenirs, little reminders that anchor a composition, yet many paintings begin instead from a temperature of color or a repeated pattern. Layered brushstrokes keep the image slightly unstable, as if the air itself was shifting. The sensation is one of continuous movement: back and forth like a dance, and also circular, echoing seasonal cycles. 

Geography matters here. Evros is a threshold. Borders are crossed, recrossed, and imagined anew; identities stretch to accommodate travel, work, and waiting. In these paintings, movement is visual and literal: buses, tractors, and bicycles pass through; figures drift, linger, or stride out of frame. The climate’s dampness darkens the palette; fog and dusk gather at the edges. Change is constant. Fields are ploughed, shacks are mended, roads are patched. Everything appears in progress, and the works feel similarly alive and provisional. 

As architect Anthi Rozi writes in yuzra magazine, the Balkans hold motion and persistence at once: a place many long to flee, and a place those who stay must keep remaking to endure. Limniou’s paintings resonate with this double condition. They register impatience and longing—the question of when one returns home—as well as the spells cast by a landscape that can feel magical, even while it demands handiwork and collective care. Materials, structures, and pathways become invitations to imagine, repair, and proceed. 

Rituals surface throughout the exhibition. In Weaving Hands, an outdoor celebration unfurls around a long table. A rain of red light seems to heat the scene from within, like a drink warming the chest. The circle dance gathers bodies into a single pulse; hands open and intertwine; feet press the earth as if to draw strength from it. Secular and devotional energies mingle, suggesting that collectivity has its own sacred charge and that movement becomes a shared language of belonging. 

The human figure appears at shifting scales, sometimes dwarfed by the horizon, sometimes seen up close with the tactility of cloth, skin, or earth. Limniou positions herself as narrator, yet the stories feel shared: small acts of care, gestures of greeting, work done with the hands. Her paintings portray everyday moments in rural life while reflecting on how human experience intertwines with the natural world. Happy and melancholic at once, they remain dreamlike without leaving reality behind.

Road Trip invites us to witness a place in motion and a painter in motion with it—looking, returning, and remaking, again and again. The exhibition proposes that attention is a form of hospitality, and that painting can hold the weather, the labor, and the warmth of a table long after the moment has passed.

Written by Nicolas Vamvouklis