Roma Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition Midnight studio, curated by art historian Alia Tsagkari, opening on Tuesday, 15 July. The exhibition offers a curatorial mapping of the emerging generation of artists, focusing exclusively on those under the age of thirty. This threshold is far from arbitrary; it stems from a deliberate critical position. Within the Greek institutional context, the designation “young artist” is frequently extended to midcareer practitioners, resulting in the systemic invisibilisation of an entire generation of younger artists.

Midnight studio seeks to counter this paradox by foregrounding the post-crisis generation artists, who appear to be inextricably bound to the night not merely as a thematic concern, but as an existential, cultural, and lived condition. The participants form an unofficial night school of practices and sensibilities that emphasize the nocturnal urban landscape not as a neutral backdrop but as active, affective organism. Through their works, night in Athens emerges as a field of sensory intensification, alterity, and diffused desire.

As Dimitris Mitropanos sings, “sinners of the night, and the lonely at dawn,” in reference to the city’s nocturnal wanderers, so too do the artists in this exhibition activate a condition of liminality, navigating the interstices of time and space — between night and dawn, between decay and potentiality. Within this transitional and ambiguous field, societal norms are destabilised, fixed identities are ruptured, and new forms of subjectivity emerge.

In this context, the artists’ gaze is not confined to an aesthetic framework; rather, it operates as a conceptual metaphor for urban exoticism—an expanded perceptual condition that prioritises the fragmented, the heterogeneous, and the obscured. By bringing to the surface those elements of the urban landscape that remain hidden under the regime of daily luminosity, the works in the exhibition turn toward the foreign within the familiar, revealing the erotic, mythical, and uncanny substrata of reality.