Christina Nakou

Christina Nakou treated her studio like a greenhouse, dragging potted olive trees inside to paint them under harsh fluorescent light. She believed the only way to capture their gnarled trunks was to ignore the Mediterranean glow outside. In *Oil Tree* (1996), she smudges the boundary between bark and canvas, making it hard to tell where the wood ends and the paint begins. Her work asks: can a tree painted indoors still feel like the real thing? Try zooming in on that cracked trunk—it might make you question what’s real.