The artist

Betty Savopoulou is an American artist living in northern Greece. The landscape around her, and the traces of its past, find their way into her paintings.

Her work draws on the ancient Via Egnatia and the figure of the Hero Rider. Through horses, riders and fragments of landscape, she explores how the past stays with us, carried through places and changed by memory.

About the paintings

My recent paintings explore the ancient figure of the Hero Rider, a mysterious horseman who appears across the landscapes and cultures of the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean.

I imagine the Rider moving along the Via Egnatia, the ancient road that crosses the land where I live, carrying fragments of myth, memory and belief. Horse and rider travel through time, appearing, disappearing and emerging again across the centuries.

These paintings do not try to reconstruct history. They enter into a dialogue with it, exploring what remains, what is transformed, and what continues to travel through the landscape and our collective memory.