Niovi Kafantari

Niovi Kafantari is a Greek artist living and work­ing between London, UK, and Athens, Greece. She completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London (2024), and holds a BA in Fine Arts, majoring in Sculpture, from the Ath­ens School of Fine Arts, where she graduated with honours.

Working across painting, drawing, and sculpture, Kafantari’s practice investigates the relationship between sex and power, treating eroticism not as consequence-free pleasure, but as a force through which power, dependency, and vulnerability are revealed. Her work approaches the body as a site of pressure and transformation, and the image as an aftermath rather than a resolved narrative. Myth functions as a structural framework within her practice, allowing ancient archetypes to be reactivated as contemporary psychological and relational conditions.

Her painting practice is grounded in a hybrid language that merges drawing and painting into a single gestural process, primarily working with oil on cotton. Drawing extensively from European art history and cinema, her work is informed by a scopophilic engagement with the image, in which looking becomes an ethical and psychological act. A strong sense of theatricality and dramaturgy runs throughout her work, shaped in part by her participation in ‘The Return of Dionysus’, a workshop based on the method of Theodoros Terzopoulos (2025).

Kafantari’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Benaki Museum in Athens, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center and Lincoln Center in New York, Mall Galleries in London, and as well as in Venice, London, Athens, and Hydra. Her work is held in private collections in Europe.