Μake us preferred on Google Konstantinos Patsios returns with a new body of work in which nothing is quite what it seems. Titled Woke on the Wild Side — a direct nod to Lou Reed’s iconic Walk on the Wild Side — the exhibition at ALMA GALLERY Athens builds a dense universe of images, symbols and cultural references, where painting meets collage and pop culture collides with politics, power and questions of identity.
Tristan and Izolde,150x150cm, painting and collage on canvas,2023
Once again, Patsios invites viewers into the crowded visual world he consistently conjures, working through his signature blend of collage and painting. A storm of images unfolds across the canvas — fragments that may appear disconnected at first glance but ultimately function as vessels for multiple, often oblique meanings, left for the viewer to decipher. The artist’s intent is not to impose a single interpretation, but to leave room for chance, for free association, and for the personal readings that emerge from an encounter with the work.
Still, if a viewer seeks a possible entry point, it can be found in the exhibition’s title itself. Woke on the Wild Side gestures directly toward Reed’s emblematic song, activating an entire cultural and social web of associations around marginality, identity, provocation and the fluidity of social roles. As in the song, Patsios’s paintings lead the viewer through a field of contrasts, where the familiar coexists with the absurd, and satire sits alongside political edge.
Orpheus and Eurydice, 150x150cm,painting and collage on canvas, 2023
This coexistence of disparate imagery defines Patsios’s visual language. Meaning emerges not through narrative but through fragments — collisions between classical painting, pop culture, media and advertising that create a visual overload mirroring contemporary life. Irony runs throughout: faces are blotted out, altered, even mutilated, giving collage a political as well as aesthetic charge.
The interventions on the images — combined with fragments of words, slogans and recognizable symbols — produce a feverish, deeply topical commentary on the present moment. The influence of pop aesthetics and postwar Nouveau Réalisme practices is reinterpreted through the artist’s distinctive personal idiom, in which the image functions simultaneously as a vessel of memory, consumption and ideology.
La Victoire est à Nous, 90x120cm, painting and collage on canvas, 2024
Biography
Konstantinos Patsios was born in Athens in 1977. He studied Economics at the University of Piraeus and at the Grande École de Commerce de Poitiers in France, and received a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, USA. He went on to study Painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts under G. Psychopedis and M. Spiliopoulos, and Sculpture under N. Tranos. He has held nineteen solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad and has taken part in numerous group shows.
Information
ALMA GALLERY Athens Opening: September 24, 2026, 19:00–22:00, Skoufa 24A, Kolonaki Duration: September 24 – October 24, 2026 Hours: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 11:00–20:00; Wednesday & Saturday 11:00 am–3:00 pm
