Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Athens

Known for his playful approach, Monk often questions the legacy of conceptual art by revisiting seminal works with humour and critique. Spanning from sculpture, painting and photography to film and installation, his practice challenges notions of originality in an attempt to demystify the creative process itself.

Beauty will be convulsive or not at all … Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial or not at all. André Breton, Nadja (1928) Crux Galerie presents the solo exhibition of Stavros Papagiannis, titled Convulsive beauty. The exhibition brings together a new series of works that explores the relationship between image and text, and the mechanisms through which beauty is constructed and perceived. The title of the exhibition refers to André Breton and to the Surrealist conception of beauty as an experience that finds itself constantly between attraction and repulsion. The works in the exhibition move between photography and installation. Presented is a series of diptychs consisting of a museum label describing an artwork that is not there, placed alongside a photograph, an object, or a gesture by Papagiannis. The photographs, taken with a mobile phone, emerge through a process between automatism, chance, and intention. Impressions of everyday life are detached from their original context and repositioned within new compositions or connections, next to other objects and references. Through the reframing of the museum label, a tool of documentation and interpretation, Papagiannis borrows the memory of works by other artists in order to transform a past experience into material for new works. By placing the labels alongside his own images, he utilises the text to give them new meanings. Following art theorist and critic Rosalind Krauss and her essay “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism” (1981), photography constitutes a primary medium of Surrealist expression, since its mechanical recording allows the image of reality to be transformed into a form of symbolic writing. The framing, positioning and installation of the works in the exhibition also contribute to this process of coexistence. They function as structural elements of the composition, determining the connections between image, object, and text. The relationship between original and copy, authority and appropriation, art history and personal image, remains deliberately unstable. Images adopt titles that do not belong to them, museum texts are repositioned, and something familiar appears as uncanny. Ultimately, the exhibition moves freely and playfully between the personal snapshot and the institutional image, the readymade and the constructed and it invites us to embrace the spontaneity of our gaze.

: Woke on the Wild Side Solo Exhibition: Konstantinos Patsios Curated: Venia Pastaka Opening: Sept. 24, 2026, 7:00-10：00 p.m Duration: Sept. 24, 2026 Oct. 31, 2026 Location: ALMA Gallery, Skoufa 24A, Kolonaki LART VIEWS 4Press ATHENS athensvolce.gr Polis 계&로소조조방C LIMVINGPOSTCARDS HESERE LMING POSTCARDS PaNN culture now.gr ΠαρεΜΒάΣη deBóp..r Opening Night Wine Sponeor ZAPEIRARIS CAPEIRARIS Achara 0ETG

For more than two decades, Kafouros has been building dense, meticulously detailed worlds from the images that surround us — cinema, comics, animation, popular culture, memory, desire, and the endless visual noise of contemporary life. In Deeply Dramatic Art, these fragments collide in new paintings and drawings of almost cinematic intensity: faces appear among symbols, objects, and half-told stories; heroes and villains coexist; fantasy slips almost imperceptibly into reality. Yet Kafouros insists that he does not paint from imagination. What interests him is something stranger: how we construct reality itself. His works mirror the way the mind takes the relentless flow of images, memories, desires, and information around us and turns it into a story — one in which, more often than not, we cast ourselves as the protagonist. The result is a world that is excessive, funny, dark, tender, and restless — a world that feels strangely like our own. For if the mind is indeed a narrator and a projector, as Kafouros suggests, then perhaps reality is never only what happens, but also everything we invent in order to make it livable. And this, ultimately, is a deeply dramatic art.

The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation, a group exhibition with selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director, New Museum; with Calvin Wang, Curatorial Assistant, New Museum; and Taeyi Kim, Curatorial Fellow, New Museum, the exhibition will be on view at the DESTE Foundation in Athens between June 18th and November 26th, 2026. The opening is scheduled for June 17th. In the opening pages of Douglas Coupland’s defining 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the three protagonists contemplate a barren Californian landscape—a “blank space at the end of a chapter.” Having left behind promising corporate careers for low-wage jobs, they embody a generation suspended between fading postwar optimism and uncertain futures, shaped by economic precarity and detachment from an increasingly commercialized world. Drawing from the holdings of the Dakis Joannou Collection, Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation brings together works by artists born between 1960 and 1980, the decades traditionally chosen as bookends for this generation. Outnumbered by the demographic dominance of baby boomers and millennials, this cohort grew up in the shadow of 1980s prosperity and the subsequent recessions. They became known as the “Forgotten Generation,” a moniker that also reflects the lack of parental supervision common in dual-income households. Witnessing the transition from analog to digital culture, Generation X came of age just before computer technologies fully permeated everyday life. While the internet and cell phones began to spread in the 1990s, the mediascape of this generation was originally dominated by television, video, and cinema. The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Gulf War unfolded live on television, giving birth to the twenty-four-hour news cycle. On MTV, international audiences witnessed the infancy of reality shows while new music genres, like grunge and hip-hop, completely blurred the line between the underground and the mainstream. The artists in this exhibition responded to these seismic shifts with varying degrees of sincerity, irony, and even cynicism. Often described as the “slacker” generation, they combined lowbrow aesthetics, self-deprecation, and a healthy disregard for convention. Others explored the shifting borders of a new world order, capturing the early signals of a multicultural, globalized future. Debates around sexuality, gender, and the ongoing effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic exerted a significant influence on the ways in which artists depicted bodies, birthing a disquieting army of decaying avatars, metallic cyborgs, and new mutant creatures. Identity politics emerged as a new battleground, while the media and fashion industries were analyzed, appropriated, and deconstructed in many of the works by this generational cohort. Some artists embraced the expansive reach of “relational aesthetics”—a term that, in the 1990s, came to describe new forms of artistic collaboration and social action practiced by many members of this generation—while others responded by turning inward with works that explored personal

Amid overlapping catastrophes, the present seems incomprehensible, reduced to fragments - to a stream of "content" endlessly competing for our attention. Using the dream as a lens, everynight explores how the sleeping mind offers a means to reclaim reality. Anchored in the ever-evolving urban landscapes of Athens, the project traces an intimate cartography of the city and the world, in which Athens serves as both subject and backdrop.

Mediterranean light and the simplicity of Greek classical and folk art. Over the years, he created a beguiling vocabulary of humane, uplifting iconography that is unmistakably his own and quintessentially Hellenic. He even designed the spaces he lived in following a salon approach, where every detail serves to create a harmonious whole. The design language of Alekos Fassianos is characterised by simplicity and an imaginative, elevating mood, with his furniture reflecting his wider philosophy about human life: the artist believed that we should never rest on our laurels, and always seize the day to make the most of the life ahead of us. All his furniture is therefore designed for practicality rather than comfort and with the idea to keep its users actively engaged in body and spirit. At the same time, they are designed with a deep love for the human body, with smooth, rounded edges and using natural leather and materials that are friendly to the skin.