by Christos Zampounis

I met Margarita Myrogianni socially one night at the eponymous club “Dragoste” of Patriarch Joakim. Due to low lighting, I did not pay much attention to her, after all at that time I was in a “defensive” mood due to a painful breakup. It took a few months before I met her again on a Clean Monday in “Philippi”, in Mykonos. “Not her, the other one”, I remember the experienced Ilias Papageorgiou advised me, indicating that I should stop flirting with the girl I was talking to and deal with Margarita. Opera and it happened the next day, at his house in Santa Marina, where he received us. The electrical discharge that permeated my organism that afternoon did not leave me alone until I married her. Margarita was a final student at the School of Fine Arts and worked at the same time in a furniture store. On the day of our wedding, having previously obtained her bachelor’s degree, she expressed to me her desire to do a master’s degree in London. Having recently returned from a long stay abroad, I thought it only fair that she should also gain international experience. Her talent, which I had sensed from her first works as a fine art photographer, was also noticed by the State Scholarship Foundation, which financed part of her studies. The first postgraduate course was followed by a second one, with our meetings now taking place outside of the British capital, in four parts of Europe, with museums as the main selection criteria. Hermitage, Louvre, Prado, and Munch Museum, are just some of the institutions where he took me by the hand and “opened my eyes” to how to see a work of Art, from the artist’s point of view.
In the years that passed, I shared her dreams and anxieties about creation, expanding my, until then, limited horizons on the subject. Returning to Greece, she introduced me to the crème de la crème of her fellow students, who today excel both within and outside the borders. With her, I went to infinite openings and penetrated unknown lairs of hidden “treasures”. On the occasion of the opening of her third solo exhibition, at “Gallerie Eleftheria Tseliou”, entitled “Constructions”, I just want to say a big “Thank you!”.