3 Museums of Modern Greek Art: The Ghika, Mylona, and Fassianos Experience

Τhe Ghika Gallery

The household residence of painter, engraver, and stage designer Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika is a quintessential instance of interwar house structure. In 1955, the artist renovated the 4th ground of the constructing at 3 Kriezotou Avenue, and added an additional story for his studio. An advocate of modernism and an important determine of the Era of the ’30s, Ghika, whose works grasp within the Tate Gallery, MoMA, and the Musée d’Artwork Moderne in Paris, discovered his distinctive model in Greece by combining the rules of cubism with the distinctive gentle and structure of his homeland.

In 1989, Ghika donated his assortment and household residence to the Benaki Museum. A part of the elevated floor ground and two extra flooring now function a repository of Greek mental and inventive creation from the tip of WWI to the onset of the Greek army junta (1967-1974). The gallery options work by distinguished artists akin to Tsarouchis, Moralis, Kontoglou, and Theofilos, together with engravings, images, manuscripts, the Nobel Prizes of George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, and the Lenin Prize, awarded to Yiannis Ritsos in 1977. The constructing’s fourth and fifth flooring, the place Ghika lived and labored, are additionally open to guests. Using uncovered concrete within the columns, frames and ceiling beams, the oil portray “Kifissia” within the eating room, and the terrace with terracotta Caryatids are significantly hanging. The studio holds furnishings from the household mansion in Hydra, souvenirs from his travels, and books.

Momus – Museum Alex Mylona

Alex Mylona was born in Athens in 1920. On the age of eight, she started her first portray classes with an English painter. In 1945, she studied sculpture on the Athens College of Fantastic Arts, and in 1951, she met Henry Moore, considered one of her important influences, throughout his exhibition right here. In 1959, she exhibited “Cry of Medea” in Paris; it caught the attention of artwork critic Christian Zervos and sculptor Hans Arp. In 1960, she represented Greece together with three different artists on the thirtieth Venice Biennale. “Right here is Greece, with the good character of a girl, the painter-sculptor Alex Mylona, who fills the Greek pavilion and brings it to prominence,” wrote the worldwide press. Mylona began with figurative works, akin to “Medea” in cement and “Adam and Eve” in aluminum, and step by step transitioned to abstraction, incorporating fashionable artwork parts.

Although she labored with varied supplies, she in the end devoted herself to marble; on the rooftop of the museum, you’ll discover the marble statues “Kouros” and “Kore”. The constructing, that includes artwork nouveau influences, was inbuilt 1920 by architect Vasilis Tsagris, an advocate of eclecticism in Greece. Within the early Nineteen Nineties, Mylona bought a then-dilapidated constructing in Aghion Asomaton Sq. to create an area to exhibit her works and people of different artists. In the present day, the bottom ground of this area holds her workbench, instruments, and fashions; her inventive journey from the Nineteen Fifties to the late Nineteen Nineties unfolds from the second ground to the rooftop.

Alekos Fassianos Museum

Alekos Fassianos, the famend Greek painter who had a major presence on the French artwork scene for 5 a long time, was born within the Aghios Pavlos neighborhood of Athens in 1935. His childhood was spent in a neoclassical home with an interior courtyard and a tiled roof, the place his prolonged household lived. Within the Nineteen Seventies, the artist’s mom had the home demolished to construct an house constructing. Within the late ’80s, Fassianos collaborated together with his buddy and architect Kyriakos Krokos to revamp it, making a small exhibition area for the painter’s works. The undertaking was accomplished in 1996, however the museum didn’t open till April 2023, because the artist wouldn’t consent to have a museum in his honor whereas he was alive (Fassianos handed away in 2022).

The museum displays his personal style from ground to ceiling. Sheaves of wheat, a favourite motif, are engraved on the marble surfaces, and a big colourful dragon appears down from the ceiling within the basement. On the bottom ground are works depicting scenes from his neighborhood and town at giant; mythological heroes, references to Cavafy, and Byzantine themes; and portraits of on a regular basis protagonists akin to “The Smoker” or “Café Goers.” Furnishings items of his personal design add to the environment and reveal a genius that prolonged past the canvas. Show circumstances contain toys he made as a toddler, together with a puppet priest, in tribute to his grandfather, who served on the Aghios Pavlos church, and correspondence with different artists, archival images, and theater set designs.

On the third ground of the constructing, his workshop and bed room, full together with his wardrobe, have been recreated. Hats and shirts, embroidered by the artist together with his favourite motifs, are on show. For Fassianos, artwork was a way of life, evident in his works, his garments and his residence.