A few years ago, the Fix brewery on Singrou Avenue in Athens was left empty. They turned it into the ΕΜΣΤ, an imposing museum of rips and tears. In 2023 it organized an exhibition about love in the 21st century that was chosen the third best in the world. Now, and for 11 months, the center has been emptied again... but of male artists.
They only include Greek artists who did not receive a minimum of attention in their time, and current foreign and local creators who rewrite the crooked lines of the plastic arts. The exhibition is titled What would happen if women ruled the world?, a question that Yael Bartana, an Israeli artist, asked herself one day, and that shines in the neon lights on the façade of the building.
You have to go to the exhibition with a mouthguard because it is of overwhelming beauty, which hits you with a right hook, sends you to the canvas and in the countdown makes you think. So many brilliant women, ignored, set aside, overshadowed for so many decades.
“We want the museum to apply shock therapy,” summarizes Katerina Gregos, the creative director, a daring mind who declares: “Rules are there to be broken, crushed, recycled.” No major museum in Europe had dared to execute this checkmate.
Women artists have taken over the polis, not only in the ΕΜΣΤ. Mon Coin, a renowned gallery in Monastiraki, will show for almost half a year works by around 80 ceramists who mix experimentation with classicism, simplicity with delirium.
Some pieces are shocking Like Gregos, the promoter of Mon Coin, the Franco-Greek Éleonore Trénado-Finetis, was born with a rebellious gene: “I studied law and was very unhappy, so I threw myself headlong into art.” We already have at least two rebels in this story.
The third is neither more nor less than Maria Callas, whose birth centenary is celebrated and whose new theater-museum makes your hair stand on end. “In the hour of pain. / Why, why, Lord? /Why do you reward me like this?”, sings La Divina in Tosca. Some verses that summarize her life of peaks and abysses and that perfume the museum with lyricism. To see other delights, such as the Melina Mercouri Foundation, we will have to wait a little. Its doors are closed. “We are in the works.” They answer at the door.
This Athenian revolution led by women was not planned, but it is not the result of chance either: “For me, women and the rights of women and those who identify as such do not have a start or end date,” Gregos argues in Magazine's visit to Athens.
”These topics - adds Gregos - have interested me since I was maturing as a woman, I gave an exhibition at the Deste Foundation, here in Athens, in 2002, and I talked about the evolution of the feminist debate, here in Greece no one talked about it ”.
Among the women who finally shine in the ΕΜΣΤ, Chryssa Romanos (1931-2006) and Leda Papaconstantinou (1945) stand out. Their presence in the museum is matched by global artists such as Cornelia Parker, Gillian Wearing or Claudia Comte, who has appeared in these pages together with the collector Francesca Thyssen-Bornemizsa. Comte is especially happy about the space with her work: “We will combine it with a dance performance to give more meaning to the pictorial composition,” she tells Magazine.
“We wanted to put their work in context without forgetting the times we live in, because we must remember that during Covid, the increase in domestic violence increased. We have to put this issue on the table and give it the historical perspective it deserves,” says Gregos.
And it is explained: “In Greece, women's rights evolved more slowly. Women had the vote in 1952 and did not vote until 1956 and until the famous Family Law in the early eighties, divorce was very difficult, Abortions were illegal, you had to take your husband's name.
”In 1983,” he adds, “I was in school. I realized many things. That dowry was finally abolished... But in the art world, everything was going very slowly, very important women who were not recognized at all and we had to reevaluate them. Now is the time,” she adds.
There is an almost invisible figure that unites the ΕΜΣΤ exhibition with the Mon Coin exhibition, it is the veteran Eleni Vernadaki, a ceramist whose ingenuity defied established norms and who even in 2024 is reluctantly accepted by the priests of the Greek ceramics and that he has directed the Athens Design Center for five decades.
The evidence is that her work has influenced many creators who have elevated the pieces not only to craftsmanship, but to art. It can be seen in the Monastiraki gallery these days. “I started exhibiting and studying ceramic jewelry,” explains Éleonore Trénado. Here they helped me a lot and I saw that there were many brilliant artists and I had to give back the help. So it seemed to me that I could exhibit his work, little known, in the context of the 2009 crisis. There are very beautiful things and they must be shown.”
“Since 2020, at Mon Coin,” he continues, “we have been doing thematic exhibitions, one about Sifnos, next summer about Lesvos and now this triple series of women. Among them, Julie Tzanni, Paulina Cassimatis, Hara Bahariou (photo below), Melina
Kogevina recreates ancient Hellenic craftsmanship with a contemporary energy that works as a balm and, at the same time, disarms. Her pieces are imperfect and have an almost impossible balance that speak of you to the humble beauty, in lower case, that makes you throb. What things or landscapes inspire you for her pieces?
“It comes from all the ancient Mediterranean cultures. I marvel at the admiration for simple things. In my work - she explains - I try to represent the importance of the daily rituals of our ancestors and I like that my pieces are used for the rituals of people today. Kogevina is on a roll. For Mon Coin she has exhibited white enamelled objects, her usual trademark and recognizable from afar. She also created a special collection, Olympie 24, (the Games return to Paris) for the Benaki Pireos museum, the secret Eden of Athens, where her objects are molded in red clay.
“Olympie 24 – explains the artist born in Corfu and trained in Athens and England – is a special collection in which I have investigated the ritual and nature of the objects offered to the gods in ancient times. I studied the aesthetics and their use and purity of objects related to the Olympic Games. “I have tried to connect the past with the present – she-ella concludes to remember the character and fair play of Olympism.”
In recent years, there has been debate about whether Athens, on the periphery of the great European artistic centers, radiates a new energy and if its centuries-old burdens, not to mention the aftershocks that are still felt from the 2008 crisis, are disappearing. On the door of Mon Coin there is a sticker that says “Athens is back.” While the motto is confirmed or not, the artists and designers are writing an episode that seems to be leaving its mark.
