While photos of the Athenian neighborhoods fill Instagram profiles and postcards, there are still some corners of the Greek capital that remain in the shade. Metaxourgeio, just a stone’s throw from Athens’s center, is one of those neighborhoods still retaining a degree of anonymity.
Though it has grown in popularity in recent years—emerging as both a hotspot for foreign property buyers and a featured stop on tourism platforms offering street art walks and foodie trails through old tavernas and trendy new restaurants—it continues to resist full assimilation into the city’s gentrified narrative.
Despite the looming—if not already unfolding—threat of gentrification, Metaxourgeio still preserves a more discreet, often unseen layer of urban life. Among the most visible yet unspoken realities is sex work: an everyday presence in the neighborhood that remains veiled in both social silence and visual invisibility.
It is precisely this duality—something very visible yet largely ignored and unexplored—that challenged Polish artist Paulina Olowska in one of her latest artworks.
A resident of Metaxourgeio for more than three years, Olowska, who holds a deep interest in female attitudes in art, approached the subject through the lens of a local. She created a mural painted directly on the exterior of a neighborhood sex work establishment—an illustration of sex workers’ lives before or after their work.
Paulina Olowska Maja Berezowska, 2025 mural © the artist. Courtesy the artist and The Breeder, Athens photo: Vasso Paraschi
Inspired by fellow Polish artist Maja Berezowska, Olowska depicts women in moments of stillness and intimacy: lounging, reading a newspaper, walking a dog, or gazing into a mirror. Naked or semi-dressed, these women are shown in their everyday lives—human, reflective, and real.
This mural is not a standalone statement. It forms the conceptual backbone of a new exhibition titled “Public Secrets,” opening June 21 at The Breeder, the contemporary art gallery located next to the mural on Iasonos Street—a symbolic and physical crossroad of the visible and invisible threads of life in Metaxourgeio.
Curated by celebrated Italian artist and curator Milovan Farronato, the exhibition features works by nine female artists from various generations and backgrounds. Spread across three floors of the gallery, the show examines what happens when the private becomes public and the familiar turns strange—probing the blurred boundaries between interior and exterior, concealment and display.
“The show explores the fragile thresholds between visibility and concealment, intimacy and exposure,” Farronato explains to TO BHMA International. “It delves into the spaces where convention is upended, where the familiar is disrupted, and where secrets are revealed. Perhaps it is the metaphorical elephant entering the room—an unavoidable truth suddenly made visible.”
Maria Joannou Bound by fate, 2025 oil on linen 73 x 63 cm., 28.74 x 24.803 in. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and The Breeder, Athens photo: Nikos Katsaros
The exhibition unfolds like a mosaic of private moments turned inside out. A ceramic seashell, paired with a risqué image from a 1970s Viva magazine, nods to past narratives of female desire. Farronato invites us to wonder: what do we really hear when we press our ear to a shell?
In video works, hands move in ways that suggest personal, open-ended interpretations, while in other artworks naked bodies emerge in the dusky light—fragmented, intimate, and fleeting.
One painting offers a glimpse inside an artist’s working studio, with its mess and muse both present.
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Another into the still moments of sex workers at rest: socializing, reading, simply being.
Alexandra Christou, Kafeneia Women’s table A. with friends, 1991 150 x 120 cm., 59.055 x 47.244 in. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and The Breeder, photo: Athanasios Gatos
Alexandra Christou A with loves of her live, 1995 oil on canvas 150 x 120 cm., 59.055 x 47.244 in. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and The Breeder, photo: Athanasios Gatos
Clothing pieces draw inspiration from “Remember,” a retro boutique in Plaka, while others explore the tension between the private body and the working one— the very garments artist Georgia Sagri performed with during her 2012 Whitney Biennial performance.
Georgia Sagri, Working the no work (Travailler Je ne travaille pas), 2012, print on cotton, metal base
100 x 45 x 10 cm., 39.37 x 17.717 x 3.937 in.
Georgia Sagri
Working the no work (Travailler Je ne travaille pas), 2012
print on cotton, metal zipper, metal base
90 x 45 x 10 cm., 35.433 x 17.717 x 3.937 in.
Farronato notes that each artist brings something personal to the show. Some works are positioned in dialogue with each other; others stand alone, inviting viewers to reflect on the silences they may overlook in their daily lives. Public Secrets doesn’t offer easy answers—it raises questions about how we define visibility, what we choose to ignore, and how storytelling changes when the “secret” becomes spectacle.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the question: What happens when the mask is removed? Is the truth ever whole, or do we understand it better through its fragments—through what remains unsaid?
Running through August 30, 2025, Public Secrets invites viewers to look again at the neighborhood of Metaxourgeio—not just through the lens of aesthetics , but also through the lives that continue to exist beyond view.
Info: The Breeder Gallery, Iasonos str. 45, Metaxourgeio. The Exhibition opens on Saturday 21/06 from 12pm-9pm.
