Pastra Nausika

She began her studies at the Sommerakademie (1957) in Salzburg, where she took sculpture lessons from Ewald Matare, and continued at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1957-1962), where she was taught sculpture by Fritz Wotruba. She also studied Sociology of Art at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (1967-1973) in Paris with Jean Cassou. In 1971, her work “Synectron” was patented in France.

In 1963, she had her first solo exhibition at the Wurthle Gallery, Vienna, followed by solo events in Greece and other countries. She has also participated in group exhibitions, including the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture in Paris, the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Dusseldorf (1973), the Europalia in Belgium (1982), the Alexandria Biennale (1982), in which she won the third award for sculpture, and the Metamorphoses of the Modern at the National Gallery in Athens (1992).

Beginning with anthropocentric work, Nausika Pastra progressively turned towards abstraction. Since 1968, she has developed a personal plastic language, in which mathematical relations and experimentation with geometric forms play a leading role. The outcome of her experimentations in this direction was Synectron, a new, dynamic two-dimensional shape, evolving from the combination of a circle and a square, part of her series Analogic. Analogic eventually incorporated the third dimension, in sculptures based on semicircle and right angle patterns, which in the 1990’s became more dynamically assertive in 3-D space; her work has evolved into a representation of the material aspect of things in space and time.