Arts & Events

The Definitive Athens Art Guide

NEON’s Portals at The Public Tobacco Factory

WHAT: Portals, one of 2021’s biggest art exhibitions touches on two events that have marked the Greek psyche this year: the bicentennial anniversary of Greece’s independence struggle and the pandemic. As Greece celebrates the bicentenary of its War of Independence from Ottoman rule, Portals will address today’s international political and societal upheavals with new works by 40 influential Greek artists and numerous pieces from global heavy hitters including Michael Rakowitz, Glenn Ligon and Danh Vo. The exhibition that runs until December is co-curated by NEON’s Elina Kountouri and Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in partnership with the Hellenic Parliament.

The choice of the former Public Tobacco Factory to host the exhibition goes beyond the architectural merits of this stunning venue. The landmarked building is a paradigm of interwar industrial architecture – but it also serves as a reminder of Greece’s trading history, and by extension, the course of its socio-political trajectory The bicentennial-inspired show has prompted the transformation of the old Tobacco Factory on Lenorman Street into a new urban hub of contemporary culture.

WHEN: Until 31 December 2021 WHERE: The Public Tobacco Factory, Lenorman Avenue. 1Sonia Gomes

Adam Pendleton

UBUNTU: The Harry David Art Collection at EMST

WHAT: An overview of contemporary African art through 66 works by 34 artists from the Harry David Art Collectionat EMST, the Greek Museum of Contemporary Art.

Harry David, prominent art collector and industrialist, showcases his cosmopolitan upbringing with his impressive collection of contemporary African talent. Bold, powerful and engaging, the artists take on the issues of race and racial discrimination. After years of being ignored, African Art has come into its own and is increasingly finding international recognition. Ubuntu highlights works by young talent from the contemporary African art scene, selected from the Harry David Art Collection, and presented in five specially designed rooms at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST). Five curators, Osei Bonsu (Curator at Tate Modern), Rashid Johnson (Visual Artist), Elvira Dyangani Ose (Director of The Showroom art space), Emily Tsingou (Art Advisor to the Harry David Art Collection), Burkhard Varnholt (Collector, Founder of KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art) each take on a ‘room’, creating different discourses and approaches.

WHEN: Until August 22, 2021. WHERE: EMST, Kallirrois & Frantzi Tel: +30.211.101.9000, emst.gr

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Massimiliano & Doriana Fuksas, We have always dreamt of building something like a cloud. Photo by Julie Georgantidou.

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Symbols and Iconic Ruins

WHAT: 137 artists, architects and kai art historians from Greece and abroad present 110 works at the Temporary Exhibitions Space.

The Symbols & Iconic Ruins exhibition explores the ways in which we perceive and approach potent cultural symbols, bringing together under a common conceptual framework contemporary works of art and architecture by prominent artists and architects from Greece and abroad. The exhibition marks an attempt to synthesize different conceptualisations of the symbol, by drawing eclectic affinities and highlighting common features, regardless of the radically different points of departure and processes involved in their production. In addition to independent artworks, which reflect on the relationship between artistic and architectural creation, the core of the exhibition consists of three distinct but interconnected themes: the Acropolis of Athens, post-war architecture in Central Europe and the Berlin Wall. According to Panayotis Pangalos, the chief curator of the SYMBOLS & Iconic Ruins exhibition, “the aim is to establish a unique dialogue between different species of ruins that hold pertinent symbolic value.”

WHEN: Until August 20, 2021. WHERE: EMST, Kallirrois & Frantzi Tel: +30.211.101.9000, emst.gr

Michalis Manousakis, the Blue of the Main Grammar.

WHAT: Anti-Structure, curated by Andreas Melas, explores the farfetched realm of fine lines between order and chaos, stasis and flux, structure and fragility.

Taking an immersive installation by Urs Fischer as a starting point, and placing it in dialogue with the works of twenty-one Greek and Cypriot, the exhibition explores the delicate dance between structure and insubordination.Coined in 1969 by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983), “anti-structure” is a study of the state of mental and spiritual limbo that is characteristic of the second stage—the liminal stage—of any rite of passage, when the novitiate is neither here nor there but, betwixt and between, remains enveloped in abiding upheaval and disarray and a preternatural void. “Anti-structure” thus describes a stage of perpetual transformation characterized by moments of dissolution where “structural hierarchies are flattened or inverted.” Whereas the dominant ideology du jour was that any such breakdown would result in anomie and angst, Turner recognized that in times of great happenstance, culture in fact reboots itself and new symbols, models, and paradigms arise.

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AntiStructure. Greek gift.

It is not unusual to find such pockets of clandestine novelty simmering deep in the underground, the pregnant margins of normative order. It is in these lands of strangers and exiles, that one finds fertile ground for radical thought and very strange ideas. It is these ideas cultivated in the fringes of institutionalized etiquette that bring forth novel ways of dress, posture, and expression that either break or make the mainstream. DESTE’s Greek Gift, meanwhile will show at Hydra’s Slaughterhouse until October 31.

César (1921 - 1998) Chaise “Expansion” WHEN: Until October 27, 2021 Wednesdays & Thursdays 12 noon to 8 pm WHERE: DESTE Foundation, 11 Filellinon & Pappa, Nea Ionia, deste.gr

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58 New Works at The Goulandris Museum of Modern Art

WHAT: The B&E Goulandris Museum of Modern Art welcomes summer 2021 with 58 new works in its collection. Wander among your favourite works of El Greco, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque , Joan Miró, Pierre Bonnard, Fernand Léger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Jean Hélion on the first floor.

Expect to see new artworks alongside the well-known Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst and Roy Lichtensteins. The renewed selection includes works by Picasso, Braque, Miró, Hélion, Marc Chagall, Jean Fautrier, César, Germaine Rich , Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Henri Michaux, Claude Lalanne, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Fernando Botero, Nicholas Krushenick and Igor Mitoraj. The aim of the new mise-en scene is

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Both Sides of The Moon, Farida El Gazzar

WHAT: Kalfayan Galleries presents a solo exhibition of the exceptionally talented Greek-Egyptian artist Farida El Gazzar titled ‘Both Sides Of The Moon’. All her paintings have a wistful quality about it, capturing fleeting moments of twilight when colour and light change quickly as night falls. Few artists capture those ephemeral moments of daylight being drained from the sky - and that of a deep cobalt blue pervading everything before the deep indigo of the night sky blots it all out - with as much poignancy as El Gazzar. In Both Sides of the Moon, she revisits another favourite theme, that of her native Egypt. Unable to travel during lock-down and looking for elements that would allow her at least a mental journey to her second homeland, Egypt, her paintings are transformed into portraits of Athens where the East meets the West. Distorted city-scapes, vivid colors and an ethereally dreamy atmosphere all figure in Farida El Gazzar’s works, brilliantly capturing the peculiar psycho-emotional state of lockdown when one’s immediate neighbourhood was the beginning and end of our empirical world.

In her new paintings, Athens stars as the artist’s Alter Ego depicting the city’s architectural landscape in all its grandeur and ugliness as experienced by her during her long walks.

WHEN: Until September 18, 2021 WHERE: Kalfayan Galleries, 11 Haritos Street. Tel: 210. 721.7679, kalfayangalleries.com

to highlight the special relationship that the Goulandris couple had with some of these artists, such as Picasso, Chagall, César, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Fernando and Sofia Vari. The fourth floor highlights the pioneering researchers and poets of abstraction, who in many cases, moved abroad to establish their art careers. The already popular works of Giannis Moralis, Nikos Hatzikyriakou-Gika and Jannis Kounellis are presented alongside Takis, Chryssa, Thanos Tsigos, Theodoros Stamos, George Zongolopoulos, Pavlos and Alexis Akritakis. The renewal of the collection was edited by Kyriakos Koutsomallis, with the help of Maria Koutsomalli-Moro. They collaborated again, for the new set design proposal, with Andreas Georgiadis and Paraskevi Gerolymatou from Mikri Arktos.

OPENING HOURS: Wednesday to Sunday: 10 am to 6 pm, Mondays and Tuesdays closed. WHERE: 13 Eratosthenous str.Athens 116 35, Greece|www.goulandris.gr

Fernando Botero (1932 - ) Still Life with Green Curtain

Ruins by Roberto Sironi, Carwan Gallery

WHAT: Ruins, exclusively commissioned by Carwan Gallery is finally ready to be unveiled in Athens in June 2021

Ruins features a series of works that re-signify architectural fragments belonging to different historical periods and which refer to the most significant archaeological sites placed in the Mediterranean basin. The project relates some constructive elements of the classical era as bases of columns, capitals, sections of amphitheatre with rudiments of the industrial era, such as the double-T beams, reticular structural elements and corrugated sheet metal, which are reshaped according to a new aesthetic perspective. The collection is conceived as a series of contemporary ruins, freely deconstructed and reconstructed, imaginary simulacra, programmed artifices where the materials and techniques of execution do not correspond to the original but rather become functional to the postarchaeological message conveyed, transmitting a feeling of “Indefinite time” that becomes hypothetical, evanescent, suspended. Roberto Sironi got the opportunity to develop RUINS thanks to the selection of the international residency program IN Residence Design, curated by Barbara Brondi and Marco Rainò and to produce the works with bronze experts Fonderia Artistica Battaglia and Simone Desirò, Marmi Artificiali di Rima.

WHEN: Until September 4, 2021 OPENING HOURS: Wednesday & Thursday 12:00–20:00 WHERE: Carwan Gallery Polydefkous 39, Piraeus. info@carwangallery.com carwangallery.com Tel: +302104114536 Palmyra, Bench. Hubert, Mirror detail

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Alexander the Great, Philip Tsiaras

WHAT: The Blender Gallery in collaboration with Varvara Roza Galleries hosts an exhibition of new works by New York artist Philip Tsiaras. As a painter, photographer, ceramicist, bronze and glass sculptor, Tsiaras’s work touches on practically all art forms. In a conceptual sense Tsiaras believes that “each exhibition should contain an unexpected element of surprise”.

The new Tsiaras works that will be presented at The Blender Gallery till the 30th of June, in fact, explore the world of an obsessed Pointillist artist with a love of Portraiture – The Tsiaras DOT, tiny but with intense power -transforms the many Myths of Alexander the Great in constantly changings visions of the historic Legend. Alexander is infused with a myriad of painted, multicolored coordinates and activated dots, bordering on what Tsiaras calls “the scientific of sensualism”, or in archaic terms, a modern Greco-Roman Tsiaras comes full circle, as a classic black and white photographer experimenting with portraiture in his early career, to realize a new painterly language in realistic hand-dotted personas. Tsiaras himself, of Macedonia origin, focused on Alexander the Great as the quintessential figure to represent the 200th anniversary of Greek Independence. “For me Alexander is the ultimate Hellenist, no other figure is history has the exotic power, romance, and legendary fantasy of Alexander the Great.

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WHEN: Until July 30, 2021 OPENING HOURS: Monday - Friday: 10:00-18:00 Saturday: 12:30-16:30 WHERE: The Blender Gallery, Zisimopoulou 4 Glyfada. theblendergallery.com

Objects of Common Interest, Cycladic Museum Cafe

WHAT: An installation of ethereal sculptures by Archipelago. Two talented designers who spend time between Athens and New York, Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis create still life installations, experiential environments and objects, demonstrating a fixation with materiality, concept and tangible spatial experiences. Work roots from an amalgamation of thinking and making between two diverse poles, Greece and the US, switching between the formal and the intuitive, embracing the handmade and the tactile, the experimental and the poetic aiming to create projects that balance between the long-lasting and the ephemeral.

Building upon the legacy of the Cycladic culture and the highly stylized marble figurines abstracting everyday or anatomical forms, presented here is a series of sculptures that simultaneously furthers the Studio’s ongoing study into softness —both in form and as a material quality. Cast as translucent inflatables, what was heavy, solid, hard is now light, airy, and soft. These shifts offer a reinterpretation of ancient forms and allow for viewers to develop new relationships to the work. The transparent archipelago of curvy forms is complemented with light sculptures, traced trajectories of glimpse passing light. Building upon the legacy of the Cycladic culture and the highly stylized marble figurines abstracting everyday or anatomical forms, presented here is a series of sculptures that simultaneously furthers the Studio’s ongoing study into softness —both in form and as a material quality. Cast as translucent inflatables, what was heavy, solid, hard is now light, airy, and soft. These shifts offer a reinterpretation of ancient forms and allow for viewers to develop new relationships to the work. The transparent archipelago of curvy forms is complemented with light sculptures, traced trajectories of glimpse passing light.

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WHERE: Neophytou Douka 4, Athens (+30 210 72 28 321-3) museum@cycladic.gr

Takis: Cosmos in Motion | 46 sculptures at the SNFCC

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WHAT: An exhibition of iconic sculptures by the internationally-acclaimed visual artist Takis at SNFCC, a cultural landmark designed by architect, Renzo Piano. Part of the influential group of post-war artists who made Paris their home, Athens-born Takis (real name: Panayiotis Vassilakis) sought out the essential poetry and beauty of the electromagnetic universe. He was one of the most original artistic voices in Europe from the and remained a pioneering figure throughout his life. By tapping into forces such as magnetic fields his art explores the mysterious energies of the universe. Using magnetism, light and sound as his raw materials, Takis’s audacious mobile sculptures were a radical break from convention. Drawing on concepts and experiences from scientific enquiry to ancient philosophy and spirituality, his electrified sculptures and magnetic installations spawned a new modernity of artistic expression. Over a seventy-year career, Takis created some of the twentieth century’s most intriguing and innovative artworks, such as his famous Signals series. Made from long thin rods, the sculptures vibrate and bend with the movement of air. Like radar transmitters, Takis saw his Signals as capturing the energy of the air or sky. He then began to experiment with magnets and magnetic energy in his sculpture as a way of showing the unseen forces of nature and the cosmos. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation with the Takis Foundation pay tribute to the legendary artist who passed away two years ago, with a major retrospective. Forty-six of his representative works will be spread across the public spaces of the SNFCC, letting visitors ‘bathe in energy’ and to enhance their awareness of invisible energies, such as magnetism and gravity, through art.

WHEN: Until 7 November 2021 WHERE: SNFCC. 364 Syngrou Avenue, Kallithea. Tel: 216.809.1000

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Usually Surrounded, Paul Insect

WHAT: Deeply influenced by the late 90’s Street Art movement and the underground club scene in London, Paul Insect’s creative expression has always been fuelled by the sense of rebellion, nonconformity, and constant experimentation and innovation.

Free from rules or expectations of the existing formats, yet genuinely appreciative and respectful for the painterly tradition, the London-based artist enjoys exploring different mediums, materials, and techniques while painting distinctive portraits as his signature type of work. Reducing the subject’s appearance to a pair of eyes, the artist builds his visuals and concepts on these compositional and contextual pillars. Through pop imagery and Warhol’s reinvention of screen print as an artistic technique or by tapping into Lichtenstein’s use of rasters and graphic colours, the visuals keep the raw and unforgiving aesthetics of the artist’s stencil or pasteup endeavours. WHEN: Until August 31, 2021. Tuesday – Friday: 11am - 7pm Saturday: 11am - 5pm WHERE: Allouche Benias Gallery Kanari 1, Kolonaki Tel: 30 210 33 89 111, allouchebenias.com

Women in the Greek Revolution of 1821, Theocharakis Foundation12

WHAT: Historically significant pieces from the valuable Collection of Michalis and Dimitra Varkarakis at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation. A curated selection of 100 paintings, porcelain objects and clocks of the 19th century that capture the role of women in Greece’s independence struggle and how they were received in salons across Europe. The collector, Michalis Varkarakis, characteristically states: “European travellers and artists were the first to become interested in the Greek monuments; in the images they produced, human figures played a supporting role. With the Greek Revolution, the sources of inspiration for artists changed; the individual now became central in their work. Early on, the battles were their main subject; military successes fuelled the movement. Portraits of the protagonists were also popular. Major historical events – the struggles of the Souliotes, the proclamation of the Revolution, the massacre at Chios, the dramatic siege of Messolonghi, the naval battle of Navarino, the landing of the French at Morea in 1828 – all enjoyed pride of place in the Philhellenic iconography. Chateaubriand’s fiery calls to freedom, Byron’s poems celebrating the beauty of Greece and heroism of the Greeks inspired a large number of artists. Evocations of the ancient lineage of Modern Greeks, the Christian ideals, and a love of antiquarianism were particularly popular. The passions, sufferings, and hardships of the vastly outnumbered fighters were especially praised. In tune with Orientalist and Romantic art, Philhellenic artists often embellished their works to emphasise the valour of Greek men and beauty of Greek women.”

WHEN: Until: 31 October 2021, daily from 10 am to 6 pm WHERE: B&M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music