I’m drawn to moments where something shifts: where history meets the present, where materials, nature and image hold memory, where the viewer becomes part of the work.
Athens holds this tension naturally, ancient light meeting raw experimentation across immersive spaces, spanning from institutions to brutalist architectures to island escapes. What excites me most is this openness, the way you move between these worlds.
There’s a physicality here, a sense of exposure, and that’s where the energy lies. These are the works that stayed with me. Through them, I hope you experience Athens as I do: alive, and in motion.
In this mini guide I present my selection of exhibitions mapped out by neighborhood, inspired by my ongoing mission for AAAthens.Art, my platform presenting the city’s art exhibitions.
01
Monastiraki
Location: Melas Martinos
Exhibition: Neocolor by Swiss artist David Weiss
Dates: 27/05 – 12/09
Melas Martinos’ neoclassical gallery, framed by breathtaking Acropolis views, dialogues exquisitely with Weiss’s Neocolor (1977-78). Wax fields veiled in black, playful abstractions, bold figures pulsing Zurich’s counterculture fire. Layered history meets primal light, Athens’ eternal glow amplifying hidden desires. Visitors unearth vibrant symphonies, souls ignited in art’s alchemical dance.
02
Pangrati
Location: Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation
Exhibition: Jannis Psychopedis: Landscapes of Memory, The Ones I Kept
Dates: 20.05 – 05.10.2026
The Goulandris Foundation’s sleek modernism complements Jannis Psychopedis’s Landscapes of Memory (The Ones I Kept). Personal narratives emerge from a haze through layered strokes and a curated selection of around 70 works (1962–today). Faded horizons and emotional imprints echo Greece’s psyche in this rare and beautiful visual diary.
03
Omonia
Location: Metacosmoi
Exhibition: Beyond the Lens, Thanasis Karatzas
Dates: 05.05 20.05
The exhibition as part of the This is Athens City Festival, catapults Thanasis Karatzas’s nocturnal shots into a hypnotic swirl of image, sound, and AR magic. Images burst out of frame in immersive installations, Athens breathes, through pulsing movement, liquid light, and electric atmosphere. Presented by this year’s This is Athens City Festival, this immersion captures the city’s raw, nocturnal heartbeat.
04
Chalandri
Location: Nobel Building, Cultural Space of the Municipality of Chalandri
Exhibition: In/Out Time, Group Show
Dates 24/4 to 31/5
Chalandri’s Nobel brutalist masterpiece breathes again in the curatorial experiment In/Out of Time. Nine artist-friends orchestrate time-space collisions: Chronos’ serpentine churn meets stone eternity, motion blurs into decay, memory invades the now. Light fractures, ephemera dances, a coordinated assault where brutal concrete pulses with existential rhythm, redefining art’s temporal breath.
05
Koukaki
Location: EMST
Exhibition: Stathis Logothetis, Earth to Earth
Dates: 2 April – 8 November 2026
Stathis Logothetis’s retrospective traces a restless career shaped between the European avant-garde and a solitary return to Greece. Painting breaks free from the canvas, merging pigment with body, decay, erosion, and transformation foreground ecology and materiality, as nature itself becomes a medium. Earth to Earth is presented at National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST), Greece’s leading contemporary art institution.
06
Renti
Location: Onassis Ready
Exhibition: Tilda Swinton, Ongoing
Dates: 2/05 – 14/06
Tilda Swinton, Ongoing is a durational live installation centered on great actress Tilda Swinton. Minimal yet intense, across extended periods of stillness and subtle action, the work explores time as subject, without theatrical excess. Presented within the large-scale industrial setting of the new Onassis Ready building, it gains spatial intensity, heightening its focus on visibility, vulnerability, and endurance.
Note: Tilda Swinton will be presenting a “Fellowship, Art, & Nature,” Masterclass at Onassis Ready on May 19 primarily for students and professionals in film, theater, performance, fashion, and the visual arts, including performers, cinematographers, directors, playwrights, and screenwriters.
