Dimitris Gketsis: Sculpting Identity Beyond Boundaries

Dimitris Gketsis works at a fault line most sculptors avoid: where ancient relief form meets current body politics.

His resin sculptures quote Roman and Greek monuments but the figures inside them are hybrid, androgynous, unclassifiable. This is not a look back. It is a question directed at the present.

"I use mythology and myths, antiquity and the renaissance, but also 'fashion' to quote and comment on current socio-political issues of now in relation to equality, identity, gender, sexuality and discrimination, wanting to give visibility and voice to all femininities." — Dimitris Gketsis

Background

Born in Athens in 1993, Gketsis graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2016, with a guest semester at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich (2013–14).

In 2016 he took up a residency at Art Motile in Madrid.

The Sculptures

Gketsis works primarily in resin, occasionally in copper. The surfaces recall temple friezes and ancient reliefs yet the figures depicted resist any classical legibility.

Female, male, animal, human: the boundaries dissolve. His protagonists are hybrid and androgynous, citing Balenciaga campaigns and Schiaparelli corsets in the same gesture that references the Parthenon frieze.

This is not a contradiction. For Gketsis, fashion and mythology are equivalent visual languages both systems that classify bodies, assign value, render people visible or invisible.

He is particularly interested in what classical art history systematically excluded: femininities beyond the white, male Man of Reason. Hybrid beings that propose alternative hierarchies.

Figures that are neither clearly black nor white, neither fully human nor animal and for that reason, open up space for other subjectivities.

Exhibitions & Current Projects

Most recently, Gketsis showed Odyssey at the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus (2024), placing his hybrid figures directly within an institution of ancient Greek heritage.

That same year he participated in the group exhibition Echoing Future: Practices of Radical Imagination at ACUD Berlin and was present at Felix Art Fair in Los Angeles (2023).

In 2025, he was invited to participate in Méditerranées at Nil Gallery Paris (July–August 2025), his current gallery an exhibition that framed the Mediterranean not as a geographic constant but as a source of artistic imagination. A residency at Telegraph Gallery in the Czech Republic is also planned for 2025.

Nil Gallery previously presented Gketsis at The Salon by NADA & The Community in Paris (2024).

Why Gketsis Matters Now

The question of who was visible in art history and who was not is not an academic one. Gketsis poses it using the very tools classicism provided: relief, figure, canon and inverts the hierarchies within them.

That he does so with satire and humor rather than accusation makes his sculptures accessible without defusing them.

At a moment when body politics and identity debates are often treated as short-lived discourse, Gketsis responds with resin and mythological depth materials that predate the argument by millennia.

Instagram Dimitris Gketsis

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