Φωτογραφία από έργο του Γιάννη Ψυχοπαίδη

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center is staging a major retrospective exhibition dedicated to Jannis Psychopedis, featuring large groups of works that reference, were inspired by, and engage with poets and their poetics.

Jannis Psychopedis’ relationship with poetry is profound, long-lasting, systematic, continuous and tested down the years; it is a core element of his oeuvre.

The exhibition includes works of mixed techniques and media, as well as a large series of drawings, watercolours and oil paintings portraying poets.

A visual conversation with Homer and his Odyssey, Parmenides, Herodas, Calvos, Byron, Palamas, Cavafy, Karyotakis, Lorca, Seferis, Elytis, Ritsos, Embirikos, Sachtouris, Dimoula, Fostieris, Vlavianos, Kyparissis, Metaxas and Siotis.

The exhibition experience is augmented by an audio tour. The voices of Amalia Moutoussi and Nikos Kouris take us on a journey through Jannis Psychopedis’s world of art. Just scan the QR codes in the exhibition using your smartphone and enjoy the tour on your headphones (the audio tour is in Greek).

 

“In the early 1980s, he embarked on a vibrant visual-poetic dialogue which continues to bring two autonomous expressive idioms together, each seeking to lose itself in the other but also retains the characteristics that makes them unique.

As they engage, painting draws its creative juices from the rhythms, peaks and silences, the distinct sense and inner feeling of poetry. Jannis Psychopedis sets out to engage more profoundly with a poet's verse, and lets it engage freely with his own poetic mode, his way of seeing and experiencing the world, so that the image of language and the language of image together bring forth, on equal terms, a new truth.

Which is why the painterly vocabulary changes and a new artistic trail is blazed every time painting essays a new approach to poetry, a new version of form, a new encounter with feelings and jolts to the psyche, so different and yet so closely related, at the very core of his expression: drawing, colour and discourse”.

Lili Pezanou, exhibition curator

 

Biographical note

Jannis Psychopedis was born in Athens in 1945. He studied printmaking at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1963-1968) and then painting on a German state scholarship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (1970-1976).

He was a member of the “A” group of artists in the 1960s and on the visual arts team of the Epitheorisi Technis [Art Review]; a founder member of the “New Greek Realists” (1971-73); a founder member of the Visual Arts Centre (Athens, 1974-1976) and a member of the “10/9” art group in Munich (1975). Furthermore, he was invited to the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in West Berlin (1977).

He has lived and worked in Berlin (1977-1986) and in Brussels (1986- 1992). In 1994, he was appointed to a professorship at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he taught until 2012. In 2013, he was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus.

Since 1966, he has staged a number of solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad. He has also taken part in important group shows in galleries and museums in Greece and other countries including France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, Ireland, Albania, Japan, Belgium, Algeria, Cyprus, Sweden, Israel, Iran, Turkey, the UK, Canada, Romania, Egypt, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, the US and China.

 

09/10/19 - 31/01/20 | Daily 09.00-22.00

Free admission

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