Kalos & Klio

Christos Kalos & Klio Tantalidou are multidisiplinary artists who work with photography, digital media & video. They run the Kalos & Klio art showroom. a private art studio in Thessaloniki, Greece, working on joint art projects since 2006. Klio has a B. F. A. in painting from Academy Minerva NL , an M.A. in Printmaking from Governors’ State University, USA, and an M.F.A. in computer imaging from University of Chicago, USA.

Kalos has a B.A. in photography from E.S.P. , European Studies in Photography, Thessaloniki, Greece. Art projects include Eudaimonia, a room installation in Athens's Imperial Hotel and Macedonia Pallas Hotel, a part of the Unfair Project organized by Kappatos Gallery, Athens, Greece.

Kalos & Klio work engages contemporary consumption of digital media, culture and subculture plus associates with the new media appropriation art. Their art works, picked from photographs and image documents they gather from the Internet, examine the inspiring intersections of digital media and culture.

Virtual Vanitas, a series of digital art works, is a mixture of found images of fabrics, classical statues, figurines, kitsch objects and various royalty-free things collected from the web, a process the artists call Digital Tank appropriation. This collection of images has been digitally manipulated to create visual fables and fabrications that reference Greek myths and address social issues. These images are re-invented and digitally assembled to formally construct repetitive patterns. The composed patterns lead to an optical illusion, a kind of a visual play which disguises the subject matter in the decorative style pattern only to reveal it in a close up view. Their art works suggest the vanity side of lifestyle and subculture, the futility and celebration of consumerist indulgences, and preoccupation with virtual ephemera.