The Breeder

About the Gallery
The Breeder gallery was founded in 2002 by Stathis Panagoulis and George Vamvakidis. It developed organically from The Breeder magazine that started in 2000, out of the need for building an artistic dialogue between Athens and the world. Over the past twenty two years, The Breeder gallery has been a pioneer in the development of the contemporary art scene in Athens. 

In 2008, the Breeder relocated to an abandoned 1970s ice-cream factory. The new space was designed by Aris Zambicos architects and its renovation was awarded by the Hellenic Institute of Architecture. Throughout 2013, The Breeder operated a pop-up gallery space in Monte Carlo, Monaco. From 2010 to 2015 The Breeder operated Breeder Feeder a pop-up restaurant in its second floor, inside a site specific installation by Andreas Angelidakis. Among the guest chefs was Mina Stone who has now founded Mina’s at MoMA PS1. During 2015-2016 The Breeder initiated a residency program curated by Stamatia Dimitrakopoulos.

At the Breeder, we show art relevant to our times, sometimes political and sometimes radical. The platform of the Breeder gallery is open to artists of all nationalities, gender, color and religion, supporting a deeper understanding and free exchange of ideas and ideals in contemporary art. It’s a non binary organism, it’s financial freedom derives from the sales of the art it features.

About the Presentation
Alexandra Christou will make her New York debut in a solo presentation with The Breeder, a first-time exhibitor at Independent. Christou (1950–2009) was a Greek self-taught painter whose deeply expressive figurative work unfolded largely outside the institutional art world during her lifetime. Drawing from lived experience in Greece, the United States, and Germany, her paintings center on women, lovers, workers and figures in states of waiting, blending social observation with autobiographical myth and symbolic intensity. This first presentation of her work in the US brings together key works from the early to late 1990s, a pivotal period when her painting became a form of visual diary—intimate, expressive, and attentive to marginal and everyday lives. At a moment of renewed curatorial attention to overlooked women artists and intuitive figurative practices, Christou’s work emerges as a vital and timely voice within late 20th-century painting.