On the ground floor of the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection, one encounters the vitrine of scale-model cargo ships, the books on sailing and the maps before the art. Panagopoulos is a shipowner and president of Magna Marine, as well as a trustee of the Dia and Delfina foundations, and she has spent a lifetime thinking about the objects that power the maritime world. “We work in shipping, so mapping and routing has been part of our daily lives,” she tells me, minutes out of a meeting, quickly swapping her entrepreneurial hat for that of a collector.
We are in Voula, an Athens suburb long favored by elites as a summer retreat, now under heavy redevelopment. “If they’d told me my office and collection would be housed in the very place where we used to vacation, I wouldn’t have believed them,” she laughs. “The people around here were not used to art exhibitions. Are you selling art? You are just showing it?” She won them over slowly; an elderly regular took to bringing friends up from the café downstairs, and a small local public now turns up alongside the Athens art crowd, there for both the show and a swim at the nearby beach.
Panagopoulos’s collection grew out of that love of maps and books, with a focus on women’s art and a bent toward the southeastern Mediterranean. Greece, she says, should “be in dialogue with the rest of the community around us, Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, Balkans, while also staying international.” The lines of demarcation have been partially drawn by curator Akis Kokkinos, founder of DEO Projects on Chios, for the show “Everything I Know Is a Borrowed Map.”
The exhibition’s premise is that knowledge is not something we are born with but something we learn through inherited systems. Maps are the metaphor for how we move through the world and draw our limits: they chart reality to provide a route, but can’t represent the territory. Nodding to Panagopoulos’s passion for books, Kokkinos arranged each section as marginalia, little notes in the margins. You enter by moving aside a semi-transparent curtain by Mona Hatoum: a fading x-ray of bodies crossing the Mexico-U.S. border, made to resemble newsprint.
Further on, a vitrine holds the least institutional of materials, hair, fire, magnets, setting the bureaucratic side of life against ancestral ritual via Susan Hiller’s bottles of holy water, gathered from springs around the world, and a chthonic earth goddess by Simone Fattal. Nearby, a 19th-century dowry agreement from Smyrna sits beside a divorce document from Constantinople, paperwork that once itemized a woman as property, speaking to women’s position in society, another core concern of the collection.
Further along, the show gathers the outcasts who found a way outside what society mapped for them: Tsarouchis and von Gloeden and their young male nudes as objects of desire, a Warhol Polaroid of the dealer Alexander Iolas, Cavafy photographed in a Cairo studio, Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle close by. Contemporary works enter dialogue with ancient maps: an 18th-century world map with “New Holland” where Australia is today, Kader Attia layering Roman ruins over a photograph of a children’s playground in Algeria, Jordan Nassar’s embroidered tatreez (a Palestinian weaving technique) looking like landscapes.
The last rooms hand it all to the body; here through abstraction, from Nour Mobarak’s “mycelium painting,” an organic piece of bacteria alive and decaying, to the shapeless sculpture of Sarah Lucas. “This is a comment on the losing of form, especially regarding women, who have been subjected to fit a certain mold for centuries,” Panagopoulos explains.
After making my way through “Everything I Know Is a Borrowed Map,” I toured another exhibition outside the center, in residential Nea Ionia, where an unassuming building down a no-through road carries two banners: one for DESTE, the other for Gagosian. I’d never been to Gagosian Athens and thought, how convenient, having the two art spaces in one complex. When I rang the bell, a head popped up and declared that the entrance was next door. “Yes, but that’s DESTE, I’d like Gagosian first,” I countered. “Gagosian isn’t here—that’s a prank,” they replied.
That mocking spirit carries on inside, in a show evoking a certain humor from the ’90s, which runs from the existential to the grotesque, sexual and nonsensical. “Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni of New York’s New Museum and drawn from the collection of Dakis Joannou (the founder of DESTE), gathers artists born, as the title promises, between 1960 and 1980. Instead of captions, each work gets a snatch of song or text from a movie or a book, from Björk to REM, Fight Club and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, to create associations.
The body is central in this show, and with it a sense of death: a Cattelan of two well-dressed businessmen in a dark room, hyperrealistic and apparently dead. We (2010) represents Cattelan himself, cast twice in wax and laid side by side. The unease recurs. Two hyperreal early sculptures of hominids, hairy and naked, walk out of a white, pristine background, reminding us of our primitive nature.
A few steps on, in a diorama, a gaunt figure in a filthy vest stands with his back to us at the window of a gutted room, with newspaper on the floorboards, a snapped power strip, a cardboard box, the debris of a life mid-eviction. On another wall, Gillian Wearing’s photograph from her 1992-93 street series catches a young man in a suit holding a scrawled sign that undoes his composure in two words: “I’M DESPERATE.” A decade’s identity politics captured in a single confession.
The show staged by the same foundation on the white-walled, blue-doored island of Hydra, where luggage still travels by donkey even as designer shops creep in around the port, is another animal entirely. Seen in photos, the former slaughterhouse on the corner of the port, where DESTE has staged its shows for years and pioneered contemporary art on the Greek islands, looks unassuming. But walking the bare mountain path and coming upon the enormous Jeff Koons installation of a sun above the building, hieratic and kitsch at once, is magnificent.
I expected the assistant who opened outside normal hours to be a man in his 60s; instead it was Dimitris, a charming Greek fellow in his 20s from New York. The artist on show, Nari Ward, a New Yorker born in Jamaica, brought that heritage into conversation with the local culture, choosing something you wouldn’t associate with an exotic image of Greece: fire hoses, a nod to the fire station you pass on the way. His central sculpture, The Show Man, is bound entirely in it and fills the one-room building with a distinctive red color. Until That Day takes its title from Haile Selassie’s 1963 U.N. address, that peace “will remain but a fleeting illusion” until humanity recognizes itself across lines of race, the speech Bob Marley folded into “War.”
Ward invited the rebetika singer Aggelos Aggelou and other Afro-Greek musicians to respond. Facing the sea, a lonely anchor speaks of migration and the need for a home, titled, fittingly, Power Anchor (For Jack Whitten).
People come here at sunset to play dominoes or just watch the sky, and on my walk back from the beach I saw visitors stop, mesmerized by the sun, or curious about the empty telephone booth (another installation by Ward), its bottles wrapped in barbed wire and dedicated to the artist’s grandmother, who had hearing problems.
Another space with a foot in both Athens and the islands is the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, whose Athens museum shows Picasso, Monet and Degas alongside seminal Greek names. Where Joannou’s DESTE dropped its anchor from Athens outward, the Goulandris family did it the other way round.
If every place has a defining word, Andros’s should be “windy”; trees grow sideways here, bent by a wind that never stops. Or perhaps, “remote.” It’s not easy to reach—a car to Rafina, a 90-minute ferry, then a bus or cab from Gavrio to Chora—though while it’s quiet by day, it comes alive at night with dance and music. The show “Germaine Richier (1902-1959) – Conversations” alludes to the way Richier set her sculptures in dialogue with one another. Running through September 27, it retraces the whole career of a great figure of 20th-century European sculpture, with her coherent body of work devoted to living forms.
The museum is small, about 250 square meters, yet the “old wing” (the second building is closed for renovation) holds more than 75 sculptures, plus a partial reconstruction of Richier’s studio downstairs. Rather than repeat the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective of three years ago, Marie Koutsomallis-Moreau, the foundation’s head of collections, and co-curator Laurence Durieux, Richier’s great-niece, built the show around an idea from the artist’s life: Richier had no children, but thought of her sculptures as her children, and arranged them so they seemed to speak.
Exiled in Switzerland during the war, Richier cast found objects into her bronzes (an amphora shard for a head, algae in the plaster) and made her first hybrid creatures in the late 1940s: a woman-spider, a human praying mantis, an ant, part human, part animal, made just as her friend and rival Giacometti was becoming the bigger name. “The Shepherd of the Landes, built from little more than three sticks, is given a head with eyes on every side,” explains Koutsomallis-Moreau, “because a shepherd needs to have his eyes everywhere.”
Later, ill with breast cancer, she turned briefly to wax and made small warriors that blur gender outright. “She had no real gallerist who had the know-how to promote her work,” she adds. “So she kind of fell into oblivion, recovered only in the last two decades.” Andros is “not that different” from the landscape that made her; the same strong wind, the same dry, wind-bent nature.
A few days and ferries later, on my way to Athens’ airport, I see how in this Greek art summer it’s less about the art crowd stepping off the ferry than about what a foundation can be once it plants itself on an island and stays. “We believe in the arts in Greece,” Irene told me back in Voula. “It has a lot to give. Right now, it’s booming.”
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