‘Life Like a Horizon’: Nature and Wandering in the Work of Nicos Nicolaides

Celadon Center for the Arts & Ecologies presents the exhibition and parallel programme ‘Life Like a Horizon’: Nature and Wandering in the Work of Nicos Nicolaides at the Minerva Hotel curated by Dr. Gabriel Koureas and Dr. Elena Parpa.

The exhibition centers on nature, with a particular emphasis on mountains, in the work of Nicos Nicolaides (1884–1956), featuring his drawings and paintings of the Troodos region and Mount Sinai. The works are drawn from the State Collection of Cypriot Art, the Limassol Municipal Gallery, the Famagusta Temporary Municipal Art Gallery—Agia Napa Municipal Museum as well as from private collections.

Known primarily as a writer, Nicos Nicolaides learned to paint through wandering—initially in the Cypriot countryside as an apprentice iconographer and later in Europe, where he earned a living as a street artist. Following his permanent relocation to Egypt in 1924, his relationship to painting continued to be defined by the experience of peregrination. Living ‘under a tent like a Bedouin’, as described in newspapers of the time, he traveled through the Nile Valley and the Sahara Desert. He visited Mount Sinai twice—in 1927 and 1930. His works from the region reflect his fascination with the biblical landscape, where rugged and steep mountains convey a transcendental quality while serving as places for personal redemption.

On his trips to Cyprus, Nicolaides used to visit Platres, reportedly drawing the landscape of the surrounding area alongside his friend, the Egyptian painter Mohammed Naghi (1888–1956). In his drawings, the mountainous Troodos region, more familiar and less dramatic than the Sinai landscape, becomes a site for studying and observing nature.

The exhibition at the Minerva Hotel—a space that resonates with themes of travel and wandering—seeks to highlight the artist’s connection to the natural landscape of the area while emphasizing his wanderlust, which he equates in his prose to the longing for ‘a quiet life […] with nature as a companion’.

The parallel programme of the exhibition includes guided tours by the curators, a series of readings with invited collaborators, a drawing workshop, and the symposium Archive Poetics: Working with Artists’ Archives and Estates.The exhibition and parallel programme ‘A Life Like a Horizon’: Nature and Wandering in the Work of Nicos Nicolaides is an initiative of the Celadon Center for Arts & Ecologies and is funded by the Department of Contemporary Culture of the Deputy Ministry of Culture, with the support of Pylon Art&Culture and the Goethe-Institut Cyprus.