DESTE FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ART - Athens

The DESTE Foundation and the New Museum, in partnership with the Benaki Museum, Athens, are pleased to announce In a Bright Green Field, the third in a series of collaborative exhibitions highlighting the work of contemporary Greek and Cypriot artists. On view starting June 11, 2025, at the Benaki Museum–Pireos 138, Athens, In a Bright Green Field features the work of twenty-nine young artists exploring possible futures where renewed relationships with the natural world might emerge and expansive approaches to community may flourish. Gathering artists working across a variety of mediums, this exhibition surveys some of the most exciting emerging practices in Athens, Nicosia, and across Europe. The exhibition highlights a generation of artists who are particularly attentive to the local histories of Greece and Cyprus and the ways in which they are useful for thinking through larger global challenges. These artists register the dramatic changes to labor and landscape accelerated by technology, while working to highlight emergent forms of collectivity across both urban and rural life. Their works explore the poetics of infrastructure, pastoral science-fictions, urban animism, and generative collaborations that resonate far beyond the space of the museum. Ranging from lyrical painting and sculpture to experimental documentary film to communal performance, In a Bright Green Field looks at art practices that can serve as prototypes for myriad possible futures.

The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Apocalypse Now and Then, a solo exhibition by Romanian artist Andra Ursuţa. The show will be on view at the Foundation’s Project Space, a former slaughterhouse on the island of Hydra between June 24th and October 31st, 2025. This marks Ursuţa’s first major exhibition in Greece. Ursuţa draws from the visual language and display strategies of archeological museums to invent faux-historicist artefacts belonging to a defunct civilization whose relics seem to speak to the anxieties of our present. Both familiar and absurd, the artist displays fragments of sculptures and studio detritus that have been successively built up and destroyed with analog and digital tools. These works explore the history of object-making and sculpture and the ways in which this manually-derived system of knowledge and speculation has come to shape our visual world. Apocalypse Now and Then plunges viewers into a truncated historiography where passingly familiar ancient tropes, grotesque votives, and scarred bronze figures hover between archaeology and fiction.