19 Patriarchou Ioakim
4th floor
10675 Athens
Greece
(+30) 210 7235 226
Opening Hours
Tue, Thu, Fri: 11.00-15.00 &17.00-20.00
Wed: 11.00-15.00
Sat: 11.00-16.00
About the artist
About the exhibition
Makis Theofylaktopoulos, one of the most important contemporary Greek painters, presents twenty-one new works at Citronne Gallery that radically renew his painterly language and provide a unique example of reflective impulse, risk and experimentation. In this new cycle, Theofylaktopoulos measures himself against hitherto unexpected materials such as indelible marker pens, conquers their textures and tonalities and organically incorporates them into an oeuvre he has developed with artistic consistency and personal anxiety for over fifty years now.
Since the mid-1960s, Theofylaktopoulos has created a heady universe of painterly integrity and existential depth with the human or humanlike figure at its core. However, in the course from the first motorcyclists he presented in 1966 to this day this figure has become gradually unfamiliar as it sinks increasingly into the matter and color of the painterly gesture. Given that with almost every new work Theofylaktopoulos reinvents his technique anew, he goes from representation to an almost autobiographical abstraction as it seeks what he calls "artistic emission": the power of painting to pulsate irrationally within its viewer. His new works constitute a turning point for Greek painting, as creations of an unexpected youthfulness as well as of a robust maturity from one of the outstanding exponents of contemporary Greek expressionism.
"The new works have been moulded as if I've used oil; as if I've used a material I knew but with a new texture which has a different hardness to begin with, and which you cannot imagine you can conquer at first. The quest is always how, working on a material with the means you have, you can reach a moment when the work will become a transmitter. You have to fight against all sorts of spectres and hardships. You cannot force yourself to be more modern than you are. You cannot imitate the new, and you cannot imitate yourself. Things always start from the beginning."
After the significant exhibition "Encapsulation-Mappemonde" of George Lappas, Citronne Gallery continues its presentation of major exhibitions by the exponents of mainstream contemporary Greek art. The new creations of Makis Theofylaktopoulos are exhibited in dialogue with selected works from the painter's production of the last decade. They demonstrate the unity, the consistency but also the ruptures in his idiom and reflect the maturity and the passion of an outstanding artist.
The exhibition comes with a bilingual catalogue that features the artist's conversations with Theophilos Tramboulis, curator of the exhibition and editor of the catalogue.