Panos Tsagaris Greece, b. 1979

Panos Tsagaris was born in 1979 in Athens, Greece. After completing secondary school, he left Greece and eventually settled in Vancouver, Canada, where he earned his B.F.A. from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2004. He has since lived and worked in New York, with an extended presence in Los Angeles. His practice has been shaped from the outset by a deep fascination with mystical and spiritual traditions, a preoccupation that began during his college years and has grown into a rigorous, research-driven methodology. He has assembled a personal library of antique mystical and spiritual books dating from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, which serve as primary source material for his work.

Tsagaris works across painting, collage, photography, and film, combining gold leaf, acrylic paint, silkscreen, and archival inkjet printing to produce works that occupy the threshold between the sacred and the contemporary. His practice draws on esoteric traditions, occult symbolism, mythology, and comparative religion, seeking out the commonalities that run beneath the surface of diverse spiritual systems. The mirror appears as a recurring motif, functioning, in the tradition of Narcissus, as a symbol of the soul's passage from the divine to the physical realm and back again. Through this visual language, Tsagaris aspires to capture what he calls the gradual disconnection from materiality and the slow awakening of higher consciousness, an ambition that aligns his work with Tantric art traditions in which the infusion of spiritual energy is inseparable from the act of making.

Tsagaris's work has been presented at a wide range of international institutions and biennials. Solo exhibitions include Theanthropic (2005); PICATRIX at Michel Rein Gallery, Paris (2013); APOCATASTASIS at Stems Gallery, Brussels (2016); Studies in Symbology at 68projects by KORNFELD, Berlin (2016); TIME at Kalfayan Gallery, Athens (2016); Let the Sun Protest at Marie-Laure Fleisch Gallery, Rome (2017); and Forever Now at the Teloglion Art Foundation, Thessaloniki (2020). Group exhibitions have taken his work to the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the BOZAR Center for Fine Arts, Brussels (2014); the Belvedere Palace Museum, Vienna; the MASI Museum, Lugano (2016); the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden (2018); the Flag Art Foundation, New York (2017); the Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2017); the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln (2019); the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2020); the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2024-25); the 4th International Canakkale Biennial, Turkey (2014); and the 2nd and 4th Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art, Greece. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art, Art Review, Beaux Arts Magazine, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. Tsagaris is represented in notable international public and private collections, including the Annette and Peter Nobel Collection and the Arendt Collection.

Panos Tsagaris's relationship with KORNFELD Galerie Berlin began with an invitation from 68projects by KORNFELD to spend the summer of 2016 working in Berlin. This residency culminated in his solo exhibition Studies in Symbology(September 10 to October 22, 2016), in which he presented abstract collages, paintings, and films rooted in his exploration of occultism, spirituality, and mystical teaching. In 2024, Tsagaris was included in Berlin on My Mind: Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD, the milestone group exhibition bringing together all twenty-one artists who have participated in the residency program since its founding.

Panos Tsagaris continues to develop a practice that moves fluidly between the historical and the contemporary, the material and the transcendent, with each new body of work deepening his inquiry into the invisible forces that shape human consciousness and collective experience.