Announcement of the 2025 G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize
We are delighted to announce that Danae Stratou is the winner of the 2025 G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize with her proposal Virtuous Spiral.
This year’s open call invited artists from around the world working in the fields of land art, environmental and ecological art, sculpture, installation, sound installation, mixed media and works integrating art and nature to create innovative outdoor experiences. The call sought proposals for site-specific land art installations designed for permanent outdoor display, transforming the natural landscape. On April 15th the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation announced that the winning proposal Virtuous Spiral stood out among over 600 submissions for its craftsmanship, relevance, development, connection to place, and creativity.
About the work: Virtuous Spiral
The Virtuous Spiral installation consists of over a hundred handcrafted ceramic vessels arranged in a spiral formation, evoking the enigmatic Phaistos Disc and serving as a morphological and conceptual analogue. The vessels, designed by the artist and crafted by a community of artisans in Thrapsano, Crete—a place with a long-standing tradition in ceramic art—transcend their utilitarian function to become symbolic markers of humanity’s eternal journey through time.
From storing goods to burial rituals, ceramic objects narrate timeless episodes of human history, capturing the multiplicity of experience and memory. The materiality and texture of their surfaces are designed to reflect both the natural elements of the environment and the otherworldly, poetic glow of the moon.
Themes such as memory, migration, personal and collective evolution, as well as the interplay between movement, transformation, and return, form the foundational axes of the installation. The work remains open to multiple interpretations and continuously redefines itself in the viewer’s gaze.
Virtuous Spiral is conceived as a walkable, site-specific installation that embodies the symbolic cyclicality of existence and creative evolution. Through its arrangement, it invites the viewer on an experiential journey of introspection within a spatial “labyrinth” that mirrors the layers and fluctuations of human consciousness.
The installation is an evolution of Stratou’s earlier work Upon the Earth, Under the Clouds (2017), which was presented at the Old Olive Mill in Elefsina.
The awarded work will be unveiled at a ceremony in Crete on June 14th.
The installation will remain on permanent display in Agios Nikolaos, Crete, and join the Foundation’s Art Collection, which comprises over 70 original, site-specific works by prominent Greek and international artists.
This marks the fifth edition of the Art Prize, an institution that aspires to foster artistic innovation not only through creation but also through the curation of artistic proposals and their integration into a significant collection.
Since its inception in 2019, the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize has supported contemporary artists by offering them the opportunity to create a new work of art that becomes part of the Foundation’s publicly accessible collection. The Foundation’s Art Collection, which began in the 1980s, forms part of an important cultural heritage in Agios Nikolaos, Crete.
For more information about the inauguration and visiting the work, contact: admin@gnamamidakisfoundation.org
The 2025 Art Prize Evaluation Committee consisted of:
- Georgios Gyparakis – Visual Artist, Professor at the School of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens
- Polina Kosmadaki – Art Historian, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Benaki Museum
- Sotirios Bahtsetzis – Artistic Director of the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, Art Historian, Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Creative Media and Industries, University of Thessaly
- Nikos Navridis – Visual Artist, Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts
- Alexandros Psychoulis – Visual Artist, Professor at the School of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly
Applications for the Art Prize open every autumn and are announced through an open public call.
For more information on the Art Prize and the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, click HERE.
