Myrto Xanthopoulou is the recipient of the Art Athina Young Artist Award for emerging visual artists, presented for the fourth consecutive year as part of the fair’s initiative to support artistic creation.
The Young Artist Award is an initiative of the Hellenic Art Galleries Association. For the fourth time, Art Athina collaborates with MOMus – Alex Mylonas Museum, one of the five museums that form the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (MOMus). The award consists of a solo exhibition at the MOMus – Alex Mylonas Museum in 2026.
After reviewing fourteen submissions and following deliberation, the five-member jury unanimously decided to grant the award to Myrto Xanthopoulou. According to the committee’s statement, Xanthopoulou’s practice develops with consistency and coherence, characterized by the breadth and multiplicity of her artistic media — installations, constructions, drawings, videos, and performances. Her work shows a distinct interest in language as an expressive tool, while various disposable and everyday single-use materials constitute a central element of her artistic vocabulary.
With a reflective and simultaneously melancholic or playful approach, she creates environments out of small gestures, overturning and transforming the given conditions of reality. Her work captures the power of detail and the minimal, as well as her bodily engagement with materials. The notion of the archive, the multiplicity of meanings, and the coexistence of opposites also play a decisive role in her artistic proposals.
The 2025 award jury consisted of:
Polyna Kosmadaki – Art Historian and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Benaki Museum
Christoforos Marinos – Art Historian and Curator
Thouli Misirloglou – Art Historian and Artistic Director, MOMus – Museum of Contemporary Art – Collections of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Museum of Contemporary Art
Yannis Bolis – Art Historian and Head of the Department of Contemporary Sculpture, MOMus – Alex Mylonas Museum
Anna Mykoniati – Art Historian and Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST)
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Myrto Xanthopoulou, Art Athina 2025 © Giannis Boziaris
