From 24.05.2025 to 30.10.2025
The Nafplio Annexe of the National Gallery and Alexandros Soutsos Museum is pleased to present an exhibition dedicated to the work of Maria Filopoulou, titled Freedom, on view in the museum’s temporary exhibitions gallery.
Through fifteen paintings and two sculptures, Maria Filopoulou conveys a profound inner drive for creation, portraying representational, lived-in environments under luminous skies and Mediterranean suns. Her works celebrate human presence and evoke the fullness of nature, immersed in rhythm and radiant light.
Following her studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Leonardo Cremonini from 1984 to 1988, Filopoulou began painting interior spaces from life. Enclosing her quest for a liberated pictorial language within geometric structures, she developed a painting style rooted in what she described as ‘the elementary structures of representational meaning.’ She later turned to landscapes – initially as pretexts for painterly exploration and gradually as a means of deepening her relationship with the natural world – until, over the past two decades, the sea and the life-giving element of water became central to her practice.
Her compositions feature familiar coastal scenes, passengers on deck, and swimmers in and out of the water – whether in the sea or in natural basins – offering viewers contemporary, lived experiences. They reflect fleeting emotional states and impressions of nature, echoing the traditions of French landscape painting and the languages of Modernism.
The exhibition as a whole reveals that for Filopoulou, nature is not a backdrop but a lived environment – one she captures through close observation of its visual impressions and chromatic harmonies. Her work invites viewers to reflect, on an experiential level, upon our relationship with the natural world – one that is ever-changing and deeply entwined with both direct and indirect forms of contact.
The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Anthony E. Komninos Foundation.
Opening: Saturday, 24 May, 20:00
Curator: Lambrini Karakourti-Orphanopoulou
Exhibition dates: 24 May – 30 October 2025
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