Marina Karella

Biography

Marina Karella designed her first set on her own in 1961, while still a student: the director Dimitris Horn commissioned the scenery for his stage production of Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”. She was in her early twenties.

She was born on 17 July 1940 in Athens, into the family of the industrialist Theodoros Karellas and Elli Chalikiopoulou. She drew from childhood; by one account she decorated the walls of her parents’ house. After school she studied at the private Vakalo art school with Panagiotis Tetsis. From 1960 to 1963 she studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Yannis Tsarouchis, whom she assisted more than once on his theatre work. She then continued her education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and later studied with Oskar Kokoschka at the summer academy in Salzburg.

Karella’s first exhibition, shown in 1966 at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, attracted notable interest. Greek themes are felt in her early work. In the 1970s she became known in the Athenian and Parisian art world for her White Paintings, shown at the gallery of Alexander Iolas; a review of that exhibition appeared in La Quinzaine Littéraire in 1975. She then began working with plaster, marble and metal, carrying the themes of her painting over into sculpture. In 1971 the Galleria Levi in Milan showed her projects. In the 1980s, after moving to New York, the colours of her paintings grew darker; in New York she was exhibited by the Earl McGrath Gallery, where she showed again in 2003. Her later work consists of landscapes and watercolour portraits.

A theatre line ran alongside this. In the 1970s she designed sets and costumes for opera productions in Greece: “Don Giovanni” (1972) and Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea” (1977; other sources give 1978 and 1979). In 1976 she took part in the making of the film “A Dream Longer Than the Night” (Un rêve plus long que la nuit), together with Niki de Saint Phalle; according to other sources, her partner in this work was the sculptor Takis. For the staging of “Electra” at Epidaurus (1984) she also created the stage design. A Shakespeare production at the National Theatre of Piraeus in 1979 appears on the list of her works.

In 1965 she married Prince Michael of Greece and Denmark. The marriage was considered non-dynastic, so she did not receive the title of princess and is styled “Marina, Consort of Prince Michael of Greece and Denmark”. In 1972 the family left Greece, first for Paris and then for New York.

Karella’s work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, Brussels, Rome, London, Paris and Athens. Solo exhibitions have been held in Athens, Chania and Thessaloniki. Her pieces are in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in the museum of contemporary art on Andros, in the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, in the Vorres Museum in Athens and in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

The March 2005 exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens (“Painting, Sculpture”) was her retrospective. It showed four periods: the white paintings and sculptures of the 1970s, the dark works of the 1980s, landscapes and watercolour portraits. Soon afterwards, in December 2005, the Museum of Cycladic Art held an exhibition of her photographs of the Cyclades. In 2008 she founded, with her husband, the Athens-based society Eliza, which works to protect children from cruelty; she is its president. In 2012 the Zoumboulaki Gallery in Athens showed her exhibition “The Path Is Long, Unexpected, Enchanting”.