Natalia Mela - Sculptress
 
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Natalia Mela - Sculptress
Natalia Mela - Sculptress
 

They said > Alecos Vl. Levidis

ALECOS VL. LEVIDIS

Nata's «tools»

 

IN 1951, NATA MELA got married to Aris Konstantinidis. Five years earlier she had completed her studies and in 1948 she had participated in the first post-war Panhellenic exhibition as well as in an exhibition of the 'Armos' group. She had already received various commissions and had assisted Pikionis in sculpting a burial 'stele' for Bishop Chryssanthos. In other words, she was, at that time, beginning her career as a sculptress. In the first four years of her married life to Aris she gave birth to their two children, Dimitris and Alexandra.

«At that time, I was a mother», she says, «nothing else mattered, only the children. I stopped working for ten years»

I would consider Nata's words rather an overstatement since, in my opinion, this period seems to have been a phase of reflection and incubation and not a fallow and artistically passive phase. It began in 1951-1952, after Nata's second collaboration with Pikionis on the monument to the Fallen Soldier set up at Leontion in Nemea; it ended in 1960 with her three-month stint as a student at the oxy-acetylene welding school in Palio Faliro. She then found herself on the threshold of a new creative phase, the beginning of her mature period.

continues

 

Jules Dassin and Natalia Mela in 1964, during her solo exhibition
at the "Hilton Gallery"
[Photo Archive Natalia Mela]

   

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