1991
Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, New Zealand
CSA Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand

Kon Dimopoulos’s series of gridded works …..seem like a newsroom wall covered by a series of TV sets, with each one flickering out its message of tragedy and gloom.
Quickly sketched profile, hand, gun, car mirror, aeroplane, a table, teapot, dog and a book, in smudged and maoldorous colours of blue/purple and red/purple blacks, convey well intentions implicit in titles such as ‘killers outside the kingdom’ and  ’the dead trees give no shelter’.
Dimopoulos’s attempt to put some logic and sanity into irrational acts of violence is both bold and TV referent. But his stream of consciousness, or rather stream of fear serves to remind why people turn to Matisse, or “art for art’s sake” for light relief.
Half remembered nightmare visions of reality which edge into perfectly valid social comment, are hard for some to accommodate.
Reviewed by Pat Unger
The Christchurch Press

2006
Melbourne, Australia

Blue Trees is an afforestation art action, an avenue of trees coloured blue, a total immersion, the trees becoming identified by colour.
The Blue Trees is an ephemeral work, reverting back to its original state over time. An afforestation art action set within an urban context – it is the response of cities such as Melbourne to issues relating to deforestation that in the end will determine the sustainability of this resource, both locally and globally.

2009
Federation Square
Melbourne, Australia

Commissioned by Robyn Archer, Director, Festival of Light

1997
Physics Room
Christchurch, New Zealand
Plastic, digital imaging

Seeking spirituality in fast food, Konstantin Dimopoulos presents a visual essay which profiles in very simple words and drawings the development of McDonald’s corporate image by master salesman Ray Kroc. Dimopoulos invites us to enter the orbit of the ‘Big M’, tracing the powerful imagery of the ‘easybite’ from its drawing board beginnings, through its present incarnation as capitalism’s most enduring symbol. Taking this concept a step further he invites comparison between McDonald’s religion of hamburgers, and popular Christian iconography, seeing in both a digestible symbolism designed for fast consumption.

Level 4 is an experimental installation. It places a quantity of organisms within a controlled environment under scrutiny, and magnifies them. In the world of the virus, we are the invaders.
The virus is sublimely equipped to survive. It is without conscience or compassion, without mind. Level 4 refers to the viral nature of our society where we live in a world in danger of being overwhelmed by our systems.

Level 4, epidemiologists tell us, is the highest degree of laboratory containment for isolating and experimenting with microbiological organisms.

The common cold registers at Level 1. Ebola and HIV, for which there are no cures, score Level 4. As the light sensors detect and respond to our approach, the large circular tent like structure comes to life and we immediately understand that as visitors we have an integral role to play in the installation.

The gallery area into which the virus has intruded is at first hidden from the public. Surrounded by a mesh-covered circular structure, the installation stands in semi-darkness.

When a visitor approaches the site, sensors trigger a response of light and sound. The visitor then makes a choice: to enter the quarantined space or walk away.

The artist hopes to bring the visitor into a landscape that has a certain familiarity but also a surreal quality, offering other readings and realities within the gallery context.

1998
Gallery 33 1/3, Wellington, New Zealand
CSA Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand

“An installation at the CSA Gallery by Kon Dimopoulos helped compensate for a recent dearth of convincing work by artists of ‘life’ as opposed to artists of ‘taste’. He magnified the oft-quoted adage “Human condition is not necessarily a happy one” with stark bravura. This Wellington artist, in his first Christchurch exhibition, created large canvases that were brutal but beautiful statements of man’s survival in sterile and hostile places. Out of undefined space his figures came, as if from a black-and-white Berman film – not, however, from Nordic or Barbaric lands: the figures portrayed are workers from the loading bays of the Evening Post [newspaper in Wellington, New Zealand].
Superimposed on a pastiche of crumble-textured surfaces, with the dematerialising bodies all but lost in the polluted white-on-colour of industrial eternity. This inky icon reflected the artist’s former humble position in a cold indifferent workplace. The numbing lack of individuality did not prevent pleasure from being found in words and symbols from print and the street. These became decorative inserts symbolising the wastelands of this non-creative workplace.

Dimopoulos paints both the hopeless gesture (Mind at the end of its Tether) and occasional optimism (Best Bets the-Tote-reads 10-1). There was a sense of warmth, like Van Gogh touches to yellow, that showed the enriched companionship of the workers while, coping with the drabness of monotonous repetition (Big Fellows Nino-and-a-Nanimal).

Dimopoulos’s show had great tension. Each work hung 12 centimetres from the wall, which cleverly increased the figure’s drained but bold presence. And it made more of the the contrast between the smeary, block of white on the canvas, and the pristine ambience of gallery space.”

Pat Unger
Art New Zealand (No. 55)

1999
Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, New Zealand
Gorse, paint, cotton, steel

Works From A Savage Garden attempts to confront certain socio-cultural issues relating to place by making use of the device of the site in a very minimalist way.
The gorse becomes a metaphor of the confrontation of chaos and formalism. Nature and culture symbolising the consciousness illuminating the work.
Gorse is perceived in the most mundane economic and ecological sense as either pest or protector. Seen as a threat it can be read as a symbol for colonisation, yet in its transplantation it is also transformed.
It provides a set of references linked to my own absorption into a new, yet to be defined cultural landscape.

“Red gorse is a living, ephemeral installation. The gorse is in flower and there is a degree of self development of the project, self erosion, that I as the artist have little control as to its final outcome.”

2005
Nagoya, Japan
Trees, paint, synthetic mesh

Dimopoulos also made a temporary installation in Nagoya, Japan, a work that now exists only as documentary photographs. Black Pharoahs Appropriation, a one-off experiment, consisted of a row of five trees swathed in black frost cloth, a fabric similar to the white plastic protective netting used in vineyards. While creating abstracted, recognisably tree-shaped silhouettes, the transparent netting allowed the real structure of the trunks and branches to be seen. Black Pharoahs offered an interesting variation on the opaque plastic sheeting often used by those renowned wrappers of objects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Ken Scarlett, Sculpture Magazine, May 2007

2005
Melbourne, Australia
L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival 2005
4m x 15m x 3.5m
Paper, cotton, wool, vinyl, glass

The Tattooed Tailor is a mixed media installation integrating conceptual art, sculpture and fashion It is a work that traces and explores some universal themes relating to immigrants and the garment industry. Piecing together memories, it is a highly layered artwork, a montage of experiences symbolising a human journey – how our own dreams and other people’s perceptions change who we are.

2001
Wellington, New Zealand
6m x 3m x 2.5m (3 sections) I 20 x 15 x 10 ft
High performance composites, concrete

Commissioned by the Wellington Sculpture Trust, sponsored by Meridian Energy and gifted to the City of Wellington