Ghost in the Classical Body

ROUND 1 DEADLINE: October 31st, 2026

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Ghost in the Classical Body

Walk through any museum of antiquities and you will see the same thing: bodies that have outlived their owners. The Venus has no arms, the torso has no head, and still we read them as complete. The classical figure was never a record of how people looked. It was a proposal about how a body should look, and that proposal has proved remarkably durable. It passed from Greek workshops to Roman copyists, from the Renaissance studio to the nineteenth-century academy, where generations of students spent years drawing from plaster casts before they were allowed near a live model. The Byzantine and Slavic icon tradition made a parallel proposal, with a different kind of body: frontal, weightless, held outside time.
The contemporary body has been shaped by a different set of tools. It is photographed, scanned, rendered, filtered, and in some cases generated from nothing. Much of the current discussion about digital art treats this as a break with the past. Ghost in the Classical Body takes the opposite view. The cast, the scan, and the avatar are close relatives, each an attempt to fix a body in a form that will outlast it. What interests us is where the older conventions persist inside the new technology: the contrapposto that reappears in a motion-capture pose, the Madonna's tilt of the head in a selfie, the plaster smoothness of a rendered skin. These are the ghosts of the title. They are not decorative quotations but habits of seeing that the culture cannot seem to shed.
We are looking for artists whose work shows a real working relationship with that inheritance. This might come from formal training in an academy or atelier, from a visual tradition absorbed in childhood, or from the experience of moving between cities and cultures and finding that the body is read differently in each. We are as interested in a charcoal study made with scholarly care as in a glitched or generated figure, provided the work knows what it is in conversation with. The exhibition will be hung with that conversation in mind, placing hand-made and digitally born works side by side so that the family resemblances become visible.

All mediums are welcome: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, installation, 3D scanning. The figure should be present, though it may be fragmented, abstracted, veiled, or only implied.​

PERKS: Exhibitions are routinely featured in international press such as USA Art News. Full social media campaign highlighting every artist individually. Sales funnel--any purchase inquiries are directed to you with no commission split. 

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Round 1 Submission deadline: October 31st, 2026

Type: OPEN CALL for all 

Eligibility: International

Categories: Studio Art, Fine Art, Photography, Mixed Media, Written, Video and Multi Media, Open Theme 

Curatorial Team: Olga Abramova, Andrea Maiello