Artist Bio

Based in Chania, on the island of Crete, in Greece. Kleopatra Patricia Bright was born in Montreal to Greek parents in 1990. She spent most of her childhood between the two countries before choosing to settle in her father’s home town of Chania. Self-taught, working mainly with acrylic paint on Canvas.

 She earned her bachelor’s degree in Hospitality and Food Administration from the University of Guelph in Canada, then continued her studies with a sommelier certification from the Court of Master Sommeliers before opening The Five Restaurant. 

Hospitality and food are resonant subjects in her work, as well as topics surrounding ethics, society and the concept of memories. 

Through the use of vivid and playful colours in her acrylic on canvas paintings, Kleopatra  Bright explores conversations in ethics and culture, hospitality and tourism, memory and emotion.

The colorful works juxtapose a subtle melancholy that reflect the messages she is communicating, which are inspired by the Minoan artistic tradition of Crete, but also by the tourist promotion of the place - contrast with the creeping melancholy of her pictorial narratives. The artist examines traditional Cretan identity and local mentality, in relation to the ways in which they are forced to be socially redefined due to tourism. At the same time, she seeks to highlight the labour burn out of those who are paid to fulfill said tourist fantasy of others: being herself employed in the tourism sector, the artist attacks the labor problems she has experienced on the inside. Driven by every aspect of Cretan and Greek culture - knowledge, tastes, traditional aesthetic patterns, but also the conditions of everyday life, work, carefree living, even forced confinement - she tries to trace the effects of contemporary exogenous conditions on these cultures - tourism, gentrification, pandemic