National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) curator Ioli Tzanetaki with EMST director Katerina Gregos and artist Penny Siopis. All photos: Linda Yablonsky.
Americans who have taken their creative autonomy as much for granted as their birthright citizenship, brace up, yo! Your currently compromised sense of possibility has found safe harbor from rampaging ideologues in the Hellenic Republic of Greece.
Those of us arriving in Athens last month post-Basel for events produced by Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation found a ramped-up contemporary art scene evolving before our eyes. “Athens is full of new places,” the independent curator Nadja Argyropoulou texted, before running off to see Faustus in Africa!, a life-size puppet show by William Kentridge that has yet to touch down in the United States. There were new galleries to see too, or at least a new location for three of them—Hot Wheels, Eleftheria Tseliou, and Radio Athènes—at Tositsa 3, the address of a recently renovated building in Exarcheia, a beautiful and architecturally diverse former anarchist enclave in central Athens, colonized by artists adjacent to Kypseli, another art hub.
Regenerative developments such as Deste (founded in 1983) and Dimitris Daskalopoulos’s NEON foundation have been stirring the pot for art since the 2008 financial crisis, along with Adam Szymczyk’s Documenta 14, the Onassis and the Stavros Niarchos foundations, a few artist-initiated nonprofits, and the portside galleries Rodeo and the Intermission, among others. But good luck getting a taxi to take you to any of them.
On my first afternoon of a weeklong immersion in exhibitions and personalities, the promised three-minute wait for an Uber to the Acropolis Museum proved a tease. I was eager to see how Michael Rakowitz elucidated the loss and reclamation of artifacts from the ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterranean regions within the context of a Parthenon Frieze that is—tragically, at this point—missing most of its marbles. Alas, no car came; afternoon traffic was intense. I saved Rakowitz’s “Allspice” exhibition for another day and hoofed it to a restaurant in Kolonaki to meet the artist Andreas Angelidakis, who is representing Greece at next year’s Venice Biennale. He chose a fish place. Oddly, for a country nearly surrounded by seas, fish is not a common feature of menus in its capital city. Meat is so ubiquitous that it has turned up on museum checklists.
Well, one, in particular: the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), where the latest game changer from Katerina Gregos, EMST’s director and chief curator, is “Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives.” Don’t expect anything like Bruce Nauman’s carousel of deer, or even Dumbo. Like Christy Rupp and her City Wildlife Projects of the 1980s, Gregos is more concerned with the way artists address where the meat we consume comes from and by what horrid method it turns into a commodity. If her title (borrowed from John Berger) makes the show sound like a polemic that only PETA could love, wait. It’s more about what art can do to instill empathy for both the human and the nonhuman condition that politics and protest do not.
Though Gregos is no vegan, her show is a sweeping indictment of humankind’s assumed intellectual, spiritual, and moral superiority over other creatures for food, entertainment, and profit. Though compelling and, at times, grisly, “Animals” is just as striking for underscoring the unique position that she holds in the museum world at large.
EMST receives nearly all its funding from a hands-off Greek government that is not threatened by artists who pose critical questions, leaving its director free to organize any show she wants, no matter how political or distant from the market. She is wise to all of it. “Everyone wants Sammy Baloji,” she commented, while leading a group of patrons from New York’s New Museum on a tour. “But we got him first.” The Congolese artist was responsible for one of three commissioned projects thematically linked to the main show. Janis Rafa (Greek) and Emma Talbot (British) are the others—all yet to appear in American museums.
By casting a wide net and giving homegrown radicals such as the late sculptor and performance artist Theodoros major retrospectives—his amazing show takes up almost an entire floor of its own—Gregos also has made her gargantuan museum (which was founded in 1997 and refurbished in 2020) a galvanizing force in Athenian cultural life. “Literally thousands of people come for her openings, and then come back,” Angelidakis told me when we joined the tour. “Nothing like that ever has happened here before.” Nodding, Gregos remarked, “We may be the only dog-friendly museum in the world.” (Pets can sit for free “soul portraits” by Alexandros Georgiou in a makeshift studio in the lobby.) No wonder she likes her job so much—too much even to think about doing a Venice Biennale or Documenta, she said. (I asked.)
Gregos is not the only curator to enjoy no-strings privileges in a Greek institution. The Museum of Cycladic Art likewise embraced Douglas Fogle’s proposal to let Marlene Dumas loose in its collections for “Cycladic Blues,” her first solo exhibition in the country. This one did have sponsors, chiefly NEON and Eurobank, and its juxtaposition of signature works by the artist from the past three decades with a sublime selection of antiquities—including a millennia-spanning display featuring a classical figure bookended by two ceiling-high female profiles that Dumas painted for the show—is nothing short of exquisite.
Gary Carrion-Murayari, the New Museum’s senior curator, also had carte blanche from the sponsoring Deste Foundation to mount “In a Bright Green Field,” an environmentally conscious show of emerging Greek and Cypriot artists at the Benaki Museum, Pireos. (There are seven Benaki museums, each with distinct collections.) At the opening, attended by hundreds who stayed for the wild dance party that followed, Joannou was quick to say, “We had nothing to do with it,” meaning that he did not interfere with any aspect of the show. It was partly the reason for the New Museum presence in Athens and on the island of Hydra, where artistic director Massimiliano Gioni worked with Andra Ursuta on her solo turn at Deste’s Slaughterhouse Project Space. Also, Joannou is a long-serving trustee. (Everything’s connected.)
EMST is a kind of crossroads. The following day, charity auctioneer Simon de Pury swept through the museum’s lobby café, where I was meeting the freelance French curator Julia Marchand, who is now based in Venice, only to run into the Venetian writer and curator Tommaso Speretta, both of whom had yet to meet in the Veneto. Off to the Breeder we went, to catch up with Paulina Olowska, the Polish artist who has taken up part-time residence opposite the gallery on a charming pedestrian street best known for its bordellos and junkies.
Olowska had been working with the Milanese curator Milovan Farronato on “Public Secrets,” a surreal group show of female artists from Greece, including Olowska. She dressed in a loosely knitted garment by the designer and stylist Athena Kalogirou to sweep the street in front of the mural that she had painted on the exterior wall between the gallery and the visibly active house of ill repute next door.
At this point, Athens felt reminiscent of Mexico City fifteen years back, when it began transitioning into the cultural mecca it is today. Or Mitte, in Berlin, post-reunification. Certainly, something is infusing the atmosphere with palpable brio. Could it be the freedom to imagine a new world that an imperfect, but increasingly tolerant, society allows?
The energy is not in Athens alone. According to Nicolas Vamvouklis, the Breeder’s outgoing associate director, artist-driven galleries have been affecting communities on Samos, Kythnos, and Lesbos, where he runs the decade-old K-Gold Temporary Gallery. On Hydra, the artist Dimitrios Antonitsis has been presenting group shows by international artists for twenty-six years. (This summer’s outing includes Jannis Kounellis, Isabella Ducrot, Brice Marden, and Billy Sullivan.) “Sometimes,” Vamvouklis observed, “these exhibitions are better than in Athens.”
Nevertheless, it would be hard to top the show of paintings by Jeff Koons that Joannou unveiled during a Sunday brunch in his hillside mansion overlooking the city. If that sounds suspiciously like a circle jerk, all I can say is hold the groans. By consensus, the mazelike installation that Joannou designed for the works (all from his collection) was an epiphany, and possibly the most lucid presentation of Koons on canvas to date.
One entered through a silvery tunnel into a sunken white-marble exhibition space to be confronted by immense paintings from the artist’s“Celebration” (1994–), “Hulk Elvis” (2004–), “Made in Heaven” (1989–91), and “Antiquity” (2008–) series, all of which were hung on walls and at various heights on freestanding supports. “Seeing those Jeff Koons works installed in that way,” Speretta marveled, “made me see them differently—with more joy and surprise than ever.” Marchand, his new best friend, agreed. “They’re so human,” she told Joannou. “I didn’t expect to feel the warmth and the emotion behind them so strongly.” A very pleased Joannou replied, “It’s deliberately in-your-face. You can’t escape.”
A spectacularly successful businessman who collects difficult art free of advisers and thinks like a Conceptual artist is a rarity. A jubilant Koons arrived with his artist wife, Justine, and their six children. The kids seemed to be the only guests unfazed by the fresh perspective Joannou had given their father’s paintings. (They’re used to it.)
The following day on Hydra, a thousand people were welcomed by Koons’s sunny kinetic sculpture Apollo Wind Spinner, 2020–22, as they lined up to see what Ursuta had done with Deste’s concrete and cinder-block Slaughterhouse by the sea. Joe Bradley floated through the show, “Apocalypse Now and Then,” as did artists Maurizio Cattelan, Miltos Manetas, Saint Clair Cemin, Jessica Craig-Martin, and Lola Montes Schnabel, who came over from her home in Sicily. Dealers Nathalie Karg, Bellatrix Hubert, and Sadie Coles were also in the crowd, and everyone was smiling.
Ursuta reached into antiquity for techniques to make sculptures of cast-glass figures incorporating liquor bottles, and for her virgin foray into bronze. (Fabulous heads and legs.) Earthenware vessels couched in pendulous plaster udders ran up and down the walls. (“Jugs with jugs,” went the running joke.) The capper came during a public conversation with Gioni in Hydra’s open-air cinema.
“A white cube is such a wrong way to show art,” Ursuta began. “Specificity is way more interesting. I also happen to love slaughterhouses, because I come from a small town in Romania which is only known for its slaughterhouse. Actually,” she added, “the first word I ever said was not Mother, but meat.”
When the laughter died down, she gave her rapt listeners more fat to chew: Classical Greek sculpture was really an assemblage of body parts painted bright colors, she said, before characterizing her exhibition as a meditation on failure. “I’m an immigrant,” the London resident declared. “I went to America when I was seventeen, and I lived there twenty-five years, longer than anywhere else. But I realize that, even after embracing the possibilities of American culture, I’m still much more comfortable with failure.”
That prompted twelve-year-old Mick Koons to ask, “How do you measure genius?” A very interesting question from the youngest son of Jeff Koons. “I mean,” he added, “in your craft.” What made him think of that? “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I just wondered. How do you measure success?” Stumped, Ursuta told him, “Don’t worry about it.”
But we all know what happens when someone says, “Don’t.” It’s red meat for artists to raise more questions. Let them.
