The Municipal Gallery of Athens hosts one of the season’s most significant cultural events with a comprehensive retrospective dedicated to Kyriakos Mortarakos, an artist who has left a lasting mark on contemporary Greek art through both his creative work and his academic career as Professor Emeritus at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Organized by the non-profit AMKE POLITES with the support of the Athens Municipality’s Organization for Culture, Sports and Youth (OPANDA), the exhibition is curated by art historian and museologist Katerina Koskina. It unfolds across both buildings of the Municipal Gallery and will run until January 25, 2026.
Featuring more than 150 works, the exhibition is structured into thematic sections that trace Mortarakos’s artistic journey from his student years at the Athens School of Fine Arts to the full breadth of his mature production. Alongside paintings and works on paper, the presentation includes archival material—printed, digital, and analog—as well as installations and immersive environments that illuminate the artist’s multifaceted practice.
As Koskina notes, Mortarakos’s art forms a distinctive and deeply personal visual universe, one in which written language often replaces the image through abstraction. His work is marked by a restrained yet forceful sense of materiality that strengthens its visual narrative.
Through the deliberate reduction of pictorial storytelling and the incorporation of handwritten notes, numbers, and objects into the painted surface, Mortarakos addresses fundamental existential themes—time, memory, loss, and decay—while also probing core artistic questions about representation and the role of painting today.
Born in Athens in 1948, Kyriakos Mortarakos studied painting, fresco, and stage design at the Athens School of Fine Arts. From 2005 to 2015, he served as a full professor at the School of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he continues to hold the title of Professor Emeritus.
Over the course of his career, Mortarakos has presented twenty solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad, including at Zygos Gallery in Washington, D.C., and prominent Athens galleries such as Nees Morfes and Zoumboulakis. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at major institutions and museums, among them the Benaki Museum, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, the National Gallery of Athens, and venues in Istanbul, Shanghai, Romania, and Berlin.
