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Tender is the Night

Organized by:
Start Date:
05/Jul/2019
End Date:
31/Aug/2019
Location:
Cube Gallery

The summer epilogue of this year for Cube Gallery will be the project Tender is the Night. The title of the art project is borrowed from the darkest, but at the same time the most real of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, as it includes a lot of autobiographic details, with an alcoholic hero like the writer and a female character with mental issues, like his wife Zelda.

Liana Zoza, the curator of the project Tender is the Night, writes: “Tender is the Night, is the swan song of Fitzgerald, who although, is considered one of the biggest writers of the 20th century and one of the most important representative of the American “Lost Generation” (term that is given to Gertrude Stein) with fellow travelers, like Ernest Hemingway, his novels can be count on the fingers of one hand. The man who declared: ”Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy”, he only show published four of his novels before he suddenly died at the age of 44 from cardiac arrest.

Many interesting elements are found in the writing, in the concept but also in the author’s stimulus. At some point of the book we read: Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.”, a phrase which gives us the style and the mental state of its creator. It’s not, also a random fact, that the title comes from a poem of John Keats “Ode to A Nightingale”, as for Fitzgerald, Keats was not only his inspiration, but he used to write his novels with the copy of Keats by his side.

Among others, we can see that history ends up describing a whole generation, the lost generation of the Interwar period, through the glamorous pair of its protagonists. A story that is tender but at the same time tough, a world of a pernicious prosperity and a looted idealism. Ernest Hemingway closes the description of Tender Is the Night, with the phrase “The writing of Fitzgerald is so natural, just like the shape that is left on the dust by the wings of a butterfly”.”

Curator: Liana Zoza

Participating artists: Bleeps, Brendan Kelly, Nikos Vatopoulos, Anna Karatza, Vassilis Karakatsanis, Nikos Kryonidis, Sofia Kyriakou, Despina Konstantinou, Andreas Lyberatos, Alexandros Maganiotis, Eleanna Martinou, Ismini Bonatsou, Nikolaos Panagiotopoulos, Vassiliki Pantazi, Gefso Papadaki, Xenofon Papaefthimiou, Sophia Paraskevopoulou, Constantinos Patsis, Voula Ferentinou.