Nicole Economides (b.1992) is an Athens based artist born in New York. She received her BA/BFA degree from the Department of Fine Arts and Arts Sciences at the University of Ioannina Greece (2015). She is currently a graduate MFA Fine Arts student at Parsons, The New School. Economides has been an artist in residence at the Agora Collective: WHILE WE WORK in Berlin, Germany (2016) and at the MAcedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece (2014). Sha was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Scholarship for Painters (2017) and the Artists’ Grant from Gerondelis Foundation Inc (2018). She has shown her work in many group exhibitions and workshops in Crete, Ioannina, Athens, Thessaloniki, Paris, Berlin and New York City. She currently lives and works in New York City.

The appropriation of Greek antiquity in Western culture and it’s romanticization throughout art history is the subject of Nicole Economides’ work. Reflecting on Greek identity through the western gaze and how this has defined the way Greeks identify themselves today.

In her large scale canvases, she often uses handwritten words as a visual language. The words may reference characters from Greek mythology, or create word play with phrases that aren’t cohesive. Either poetic or just mere nonsense, Economides writes in Greek to emphasize the gap in perception. She allows the viewer to project their desires on the painting. The text becomes abstract, it becomes defined by its gestural form rather than its content and the subject matter is left to fall upon speculation.