Painting the Body: Feminist Musings on Visual Autographies Maria Tamboukou, University of East London, UK Abstract In this paper I look at autographical depictions of the body in the work of Mato Ioannidou, a Greek woman artist, who participated in a wider narrative-based project on visual and textual entanglements between life and art. The paper unfolds in three parts: first, I give an overview of Ioannidous artwork, making connections with significant events in her life; then I discuss feminist theorizations of embodiment and visual auto/biography; and finally I draw on insights from Spinozist feminist philosophers to discuss the artists portrayal of womens bodies in three cycles of her work. What I argue is that the body becomes a centerpiece in the attempt to perceive connections between life and art through expressionism rather than representation. My painting is all about my life, nothing else. . . . through my paintings I tell my life-story, I write my autobiography. . . . I have often painted raw feelings and emotions before I had even realized what I had been going through. — Mato Ioannidou The extract above comes from a life-history interview with the Greek artist Mato Ioannidou in her studio in Athens in May 2006, part of a wider project with contemporary women artists. 1 In preparation for this interview, I had visited Ioannidous solo exhibition 2 in the Greek island of Syros in the summer of 2005, and I had also meticulously studied exhibition catalogs of her previous work. However, it was actually when I went to her studio for the interview that I had the chance to immerse myself in the rich and colorful world of her paintings across times and places. Ioannidous artwork is rich and multifaceted, in terms of both themes and topics as well as the media and materials she is working with, 3 but in this paper I will focus on her artistic and aesthetic practices vis-à-vis female bodies. What I argue is that Ioannidous paintings are forcefully entangled with autobiographical narratives and create a plane for the female self to emerge as an embodied figure in the web of human and nonhuman relations. The essay unfolds in three parts: first I give an overview of Ioannidous artwork, then I discuss feminist theorizations of embodiment in philosophy and visual auto/biography, and finally I make connections between insights from Spinozist feminist philosophers with Ioannidous portrayal of womens bodies in three cycles of her work: Erotics, Women, and Ai-Giorgis (Saint George). Mato Ioannidou: A Self-Portrait of the Artist Mato Ioannidou was born in Athens in 1960 and studied French literature, theater, and painting at the Sorbonne and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1978 and 1985. She then returned to Athens, where she has lived and worked as an independent artist but also as an art teacher in schools and community workshops. Talking about her journey, Ioannidou remembered that she had always wanted to become an artist, but the routes she followed to become one were not quite straightforward. After failing to enter the School of Fine Arts in Athens, she went to Paris, and it was while being absorbed in the literary worlds and the medieval phonetics of the French language that she became inspired to take up painting again. Her first maître was the sculptor Roger Plin, 4 about whom she says, I owe a lot; when he retired, and after some anxious wanderings, she followed Jean Bertolles atelier. 5 What drew her to these ateliers was a disciplined approach to what art should be about, which was quite out of tune with the 1980s spirit of experimentation and of