Nicole Economides
My Leaves on the Bed
SEPTEMBER 09 – OCTOBER 03, 2026
DROSTE GALLADÉ SALON BERLIN
SCHLÜTERSTRASSE 47
10629 BERLIN
OPENING RECEPTION:
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 08, 2026
5 – 9 PM
OPENING HOURS BERLIN ART WEEK:
WED 09/09: 2 – 6 PM
THU 09/10: 2 – 6 PM
FRI 09/11.: 3 – 8 PM
SAT 09/12: 9:30 AM – 12 PM CROISSANT & CREMANT BREAKFAST,
5 – 6 PM
SUN 09/13.: 2 – 5 PM
My Leaves on the Bed is the first solo exhibition in Germany by the Greek-American painter Nicole Economides, launching bonrossi’s programme of curated interventions. Rooted in a small group of photographs discovered inside the artist’s grandmother’s wedding album, the exhibition brings together painting, personal archive and moving image to explore the fragile intersections of memory, migration and inherited belonging.
Marking a significant new chapter in Economides‘ practice, the exhibition is centered around a large-format painting titled Dance with wooden Spoons (Mother Spring) (2026), drawn from a black-and-white original: the artist’s grandmother dancing at a 1950s celebration in Greece, where her father’s family resettled from Asia Minor about a generation before. In a room thick with music and closeness, the spoon dance — a wedding tradition carried into their new life — becomes, in Economides’ hands, an inherited choreography. Throughout the exhibition, two more paintings return to the same moment from different perspectives, giving the grandmother and her husband each their own canvas. Together, they gradually weave a web of family connections into view.
Alongside this unfolds the parallel story of the artist‘s mother’s family, who emigrated from Athens to New York in the late 1960s. A Place Called Here (2025) anchors this branch of the family history: a children’s birthday party where the artist’s young grandmother, whom she knew and loved closely, appears among family and friends, the scene glowing like a rare moment of ease within the uncertainties of a new life. The Stairway to the Garage (in 12 parts) (2025) extends this narrative, portraying the artist’s mother as a child on the family’s Brooklyn staircase. Across twelve panels, the same image repeats while colour and contour gradually shift until recognition itself begins to dissolve — memory staged as repetition, transformed with every pass.
Economides paints every colour from memory and imagination rather than observation. In the new series, the figures glow in purplish light while, around them, colour breaks loose in warmer, more vivid strokes, performing the music and movement of the dance itself. Underneath it all run the same currents that have shaped the artist‘s practice from the start — themes of nostalgia, migration, and the search for identity unfolding between two continents, tracing a journey from New York City to Athens. It is through this lens that, in Berlin – where questions of movement, identity, and belonging remain central to the city’s cultural fabric – Economides‘ paintings reach beyond a private family archive into something more universal.
Installed within a lived-in apartment at Droste Galladé Salon Berlin, where visitors are invited to move through and inhabit the space, the paintings ultimately extend beyond the individuals they portray, revealing instead the quiet architecture of belonging that any viewer might recognise within their own experience. The exhibition takes its title from the contemporary Greek song My Roots in the Air, My Leaves on the Bed, a phrase that, for Economides, evokes the condition of diaspora: lives suspended between places, sustained by memory, kinship, and the enduring ties of home.
Complementing the exhibition is a documentary film, produced by bonrossi and shot in New York and Athens, that replaces the traditional artist interview with an intimate portrait of Economides.
Nicole Economides (b. 1992, New York) lives and works between Athens and New York. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, and a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Ioannina, Greece. She has exhibited widely across Greece and the United States, including solo shows at Callirrhoë, Athens, and group exhibitions at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens, and Lincoln Center, New York. Economides has been awarded the Hopper Prize (2024), ARTWORKS- Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship (2022), the Gerondelis Foundation Scholarship (2019), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2018), and IBM Grant for Artists in New Media (2017). She has participated in international residencies such as the Curatorial Project for Research (2026), The New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation (2026) and The Philippe and Marion Lambert Residency (2025). My Leaves on the Bed is her first solo exhibition in Germany.
bonrossi is an independent curatorial duo founded in spring 2026 by Catharina Bonorden and Margherita Rossi. A hybrid gallery concept, working across changing spaces selected to respond to each curatorial idea, bonrossi presents exhibitions alongside a platform for emerging artistic voices, introducing international artists across a broad range of media to Berlin audiences. Each edition places an international position in direct conversation with a Berlin counterpart, unfolding across dinners, talks, film screenings, and gatherings.
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