The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA
MFA, Sculpture
Natal Institute of Technology, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa
BFA, Sculpture (Minor: Painting)
Georgia Kotretsos (b. 1978, Thessaloniki, Greece) is a visual artist, researcher and publisher based in Athens, Greece. She moved to South Africa in her early teens while the abolition of apartheid was underway. Kotretsos holds an MFA Degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a Full Merit Scholarship (2004) in the United States and a BFA Degree from the Durban Institute of Technology in KwaZulu Natal (2000) in South Africa.
With her work, she critiques the conformity of seeing by studying, proposing and practicing liberating and anarchic approaches to looking at art in an effort to support that seeing is site-specific and spectatorial emancipation the source of our art knowledge. Through her research-based practice, she encourages speculative approaches to how knowledge is and/or could be produced in the physical and digital world.
Her work has been presented at the: Onassis Art Center, NY; the Asian Society, NY; the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art; the Tinguely Museum, Basel, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse; the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, and at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis among other institutions in Greece and abroad. Her works appear in many catalogs, books and publications both nationally and internationally.
Artworks by Kotretsos may be found in the permanent collection of the National Bank of Greece, the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation in Greece as well in numerous private collections.
Kotretsos is the recipient of eighteen grants, awards and fellowships in support of her own creative endeavors and research. She has been nominated for the FAENA Art Prize, the Future Generation Art Prize and the FOLLOW FLUXUS Fellowship.
Previously, her own work found to concur with her action to co-found the five-year art project Boots Contemporary Art Space in St. Louis, MO – a contemporary art laboratory (2006-10). In addition, she founded and edited BootPrint (2006-10), a biannual journal made by and for artists. Between 2009-13, Kotretsos served as the columnist of Inside the Artist’s Studio for the PBS Arts Feature, Art21 Magazine. In 2014 her column was published on LABKULTUR.TV in Germany. Between HIGHLIGHTS, ASANTE, Boot Print, Art21, LABLULTUR and previous independent publications and platforms in South Africa, the United States and Greece combined, Kotretsos has in her resume over five hundred published interviews of art professionals worldwide. She has contributed to research journals and periodicals on research topics relating directly to her own practice or on outcomes of research-based projects. In 2018 in the Field Journal, Kotretsos was invited to contribute to the 2008-2018 ten-year austerity report on Greek art and culture, a paper entitled Athens Is the Only Cave in the World That Has a Skylight edited by Gregory Sholette. To conclude on her publishing endeavors, Kotretsos has served as the editor-in-chief and published through various platforms sixteen journals and five books on contemporary art practices to this day.
Contemporary social practices, as well as community building through the appreciation of intangible cultural heritage, has been a parallel creative journey she has paved by founding her own or hosting platforms. Whether in Greece or in the wider Mediterranean region, underdeveloped urban and rural geographical areas have served as locations of inquiry.
Kotretsos has been serving for over a year as the creative advisor for an AI, Web3 consortium of ten leading international research institutions, a METAVERSE creative project and agrifood/innovation project, which has been selected and supported to be part of a year-long incubator among another ten inspiring projects.
Between 2016 and 2020, Kotretsos was the youngest member to join the National Council of Greek Women (The National Council of Greek Women (NCGW), a non-governmental organization (NGO), which is a member of the International Council of Women (ICW-CIF) and a founding member of the European Center of the International Council of Women (ECICW-CECIF); it is also a member of the European Women’s Lobby (EWL-LEF) and of the Association Feminine de l’ Europe Meridionale(AFEM). Founded in 1908 as the first federation of women’s organizations, the NCGW now consists of 47 women’s organizations in Greece and Cyprus. It also has individual members).
Also, between 2014 and 2016, she was a member of the Tower (TOWER (Thessaloniki Organisation for Women’s Employment and Resources) is a non-governmental, non-profit organization focusing on encouraging career development, providing support and motivation to professionally oriented foreign and Greek women who live in Thessaloniki).
In 2013 and for three consecutive years, Kotretsos joined the Forum D’Avignon Ruhr 2014, organized by the European Centre for Creative Economy (ecce) in Essen, Germany.