In Artcation: Art Across the Greek Islands, Summer 2025
- Eleni Doulgeraki
- Aug 20
- 5 min read
This summer, Greece’s islands become a stage for contemporary art in dialogue with history, landscape, and society. Pack your sunscreen and your curiosity—this summer, the Greek islands are calling art lovers on a journey where galleries meet the sea. From Yannis Adamakos’s dreamy abstractions on Poros, to Andra Ursuța’s uncanny sculptures in Hydra, and Yorgos Maraziotis’s thought-provoking installations in Lesvos, each stop turns the islands into a living, breathing exhibition. It’s less about checking off shows, and more about wandering, discovering, and letting the art surprise you along the way.
What You Wear Is What You Are at the Contemporary Art Museum of Rethymno Crete (May–October 2025)
Clothing is never just clothing. It carries memory, desire, social codes, and sometimes rebellion stitched into its seams. The exhibition WHAT YOU WEAR IS WHAT YOU ARE at the Contemporary Art Museum of Crete (May–October 2025) brings this tension between art and dress to the surface. Gathering works by 29 artists and designers, including a moving homage to Sophia Kokosalaki, it explores how what we put on our bodies can be as revealing as what we create in the studio.
For me, it’s a reminder that fashion and art are not separate languages—they overlap, provoke, and expose. This blog is where I’ll trace those connections, looking at how contemporary art borrows from the everyday ritual of getting dressed, and how our wardrobes can sometimes feel like exhibitions of their own.
From 1850 Until Today — Museum of Visual Arts of Heraklion Crete (June–October 2025)
What does it mean to tell the story of art through a collection that spans 170 years? The exhibition FROM 1850 UNTIL TODAY at the Museum of Visual Arts of Heraklion sets out to do exactly that. It is a kind of “chain”: from the early artists who shaped the institution to those working today, every link carries a personal gesture of continuity.
The museum space, perhaps modest in scale compared to the breadth of the collection, doesn’t limit the narrative. On the contrary, the careful rotation of works ensures that each visit offers something new. The balance between older and contemporary artists illuminates the evolution of Greek art without losing sight of its essence.
Takis 1∞ — Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros (June 22–November 2, 2025)
The Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation marks the centenary of Takis (Panayiotis Vassilakis, 1925–2019) with a sweeping, dual-site retrospective—Takis 1∞—on view June 22 to November 2, 2025. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Andros, the exhibition unfolds across two architectural wings, offering a layered view of the artist’s oeuvre: the Old Wing presents his seminal Signals series, while the New Wing charts his artistic evolution from early sculptural works through to experiments in magnetism, geometry, and sensual abstraction.
Curated by Marie Koutsomallis-Moreau and Toby Kamps, this unprecedented focus across all temporary spaces provides a rich, interdisciplinary encounter with one of Greece’s most influential modern artists.
In Between — CITRONNE Gallery, Poros (June 14 – September 21, 2025)
CITRONNE Gallery, Poros, presents In Between, a solo exhibition by Yannis Adamakos, one of the most distinguished figures in Greek abstract painting. Adamakos’s practice is grounded in the creation of indeterminate landscapes—sensory reflections refracted through memory. His work consistently probes the thresholds between explosion and stillness, light and shadow, spontaneity and structure. At its core lies his exploration of emptiness: not as void, but as a space dense with meaning and sensation.
The exhibition introduces a new body of paintings and collages. These works are composed along vertical and horizontal axes that form an imagined grid, a structural device through which Adamakos achieves a dynamic equilibrium—between the serenity of the horizontal and the ascension of the vertical. His collages, meanwhile, present an idiosyncratic approach to paper: fragments are cut, torn, and reassembled in acts of both destruction and renewal, underscoring the expressive force of gesture.
Apocalypse Now and Then — DESTE Foundation Project Space, Hydra (June 24 – October 31, 2025)
Perched above the sea on the island of Hydra, the old slaughterhouse-turned-project space of the DESTE Foundation has always carried an aura of ritual and transformation. This summer, that aura deepens with Andra Ursuța’s exhibition Apocalypse Now and Then.
Ursuța, known for her unsettling blend of myth, history, and dark humor, fills the site with works that resemble archaeological finds from a civilization that never quite existed. Bronze vessels, helmets, and chairs appear corroded, mutated, or infused with ominous forms—snakes writhing from a headpiece, a jug haunted by desert winds, a seat that hovers between invitation and menace. They are relics that feel both familiar and hallucinatory, collapsing the distance between antiquity and the present.
What emerges is less a survey of ruins than a meditation on how cultures imagine their own endings. The Hydra slaughterhouse—raw stone walls open to the horizon—becomes the perfect stage for Ursuța’s fictional archaeology. Inside this charged space, the past feels unstable, the future precarious, and the present moment suspended “in between,” caught in the recursive cycle of decay and reinvention.
Blue Moon — K-Gold Temporary Gallery, Lesvos (July 12 – August 31)
At the K-Gold Temporary Gallery in Agia Paraskevi, Lesvos, artist Yorgos Maraziotis presents his solo exhibition Blue Moon, curated by *Nicolas Vamvouklis. The show unfolds on an island that has, for years, stood at the center of the refugee crisis—a place where displacement is not an abstract idea but a lived reality.
Maraziotis approaches this charged subject through a mix of sculpture and installation, creating works that echo the movement between places, the shifting of borders, and the fragile space of transition. Rather than illustrating displacement directly, his practice evokes its emotional and psychological textures—the instability, the fragmentation, but also the resilience embedded in acts of passage.
In situ, Blue Moon resonates with the landscape and history of Lesvos itself. It asks visitors to reflect on how migration shapes not only personal identity but also collective memory. The exhibition is free to the public, opening the conversation to the community it seeks to mirror and engage.
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Traversing these island exhibitions, one notices a common thread: the tension between place and perception, absence and presence, memory and imagination. The art transforms the islands into arenas of reflection, where the viewer becomes a participant in the ongoing conversation between environment, history, and contemporary creativity. Summer 2025 offers not just a chance to witness these works but to inhabit them, even briefly, and emerge with new perspectives on both art and the world around us.
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