Inspired by the principles of the Russian Avant-Garde and its vision of artistic synthesis, the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum brings music into its exhibition spaces. Echoing the collaborative aspirations of painters, architects, playwrights, directors, and musicians in pursuit of a total work of art, the programme invites visitors to experience art from multiple viewpoints.
On June 17, the National Gallery will host the fourth and final concert in the Painters and Composers Meeting in Time series at its Central Building. Featuring the Athens Classical Players, the concert – titled Migrant 20th–21st c. – presents masterpieces of classical Western music in conversation with contemporary artworks from the Museum’s permanent collection, bringing music and the visual arts into creative dialogue.
This month, visitors can still enjoy the temporary exhibition The Avant-Garde World. City, Nature, Universe, Human, which has been warmly embraced by the Athenian public and has attracted visitors from across Greece and abroad. Thematic and educational guided tours led by the Museum’s curators will continue throughout the month. On June 14, the public can also attend a guided tour of the exhibition at the Central Building, led by the Director of the National Gallery.
On June 21, we are heading to Nafplion! The National Gallery and its Nafplion Annex – currently hosting Helene Pavlopoulou’s exhibition Zoephoros – will celebrate World Music Day with a unique concert dedicated to some of Greece’s most important poets and composers, as well as to traditional music. Singer Cybèle Castoriadis and guitarist Orestis Kalampalikis will present a programme of Greek poetry set to music, conversing with Pavlopoulou’s visual world, immersed in intense, deep blue and inner vibrations.
On June 26, we travel to the National Gallery’s Corfu Annex for a new exhibition dedicated to the work of Alekos Fassianos. Bringing together 46 works, the exhibition offers a representative overview of the artist’s creative journey. The pieces – drawn from the collections of the National Gallery, the Alekos Fassianos Museum, and private collections – span nearly six decades of his artistic production.
On June 27, we gather at the National Glyptotheque to celebrate twenty years since the opening of its permanent exhibition. The only exhibition of Modern Greek Sculpture of its kind, it features works by the most important Modern Greek sculptors, tracing the development of the medium from the foundation of the modern Greek state to the present day, across ten thematic sections. A summer stroll through both the indoor and outdoor spaces of the Glyptotheque is sure to impress and inspire.
National Gallery – Corfu Annex
New Exhibition
Alekos Fassianos. Under the Summer Sun
‘I paint whatever touches me, whatever I feel about life – just like that. Golden horsemen who now live only in our dreams, languid women and lovers… I love the light that caresses faces; what poetry in a body bathed in it! I love colours, naked bodies, fabrics, the red room, a fugitive’s story, small, ordinary events. The sight amid rocks and bushes, the wave that breaks, rattling the pebbles… The view from my window is a little mountain with a monastery and cypress trees…’
The poetic gaze of Alekos Fassianos unfolds through figures, colours, and moments inspired by everyday life and memory. The public will have the opportunity to discover this distinctive visual world in the exhibition Alekos Fassianos. Under the Summer Sun, presented at the National Gallery’s Corfu Annex.
Bringing together 46 works – including oils, acrylics, and prints – the exhibition offers a representative overview of the artist’s creative journey. The featured pieces are drawn from the collections of the National Gallery, the Alekos Fassianos Museum, and private collections, spanning nearly six decades of his artistic production. Together, they highlight both the consistency and the evolution of Fassianos’s practice, alongside his singular ability to transform life’s “small, ordinary” moments into images full of life and intensity. The exhibition offers a meaningful opportunity to engage with the work of one of Greece’s most important contemporary artists and experience his unique visual language up close.
Curator: Efi Agathonikou, Head of Collections and Museology Programme, National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum
Visitor Information
Opening: Friday, June 26
Time: 20:30
Venue: National Gallery – Corfu Annex
Castellino Building, Kato Korakiana
Tel.: 26610 93333
Annex manager: Marina Papassotiriou
[email protected]
Access: The Annex is located 14 kilometres from the city of Corfu, in the Kato Korakiana area, on the National Road to Paleokastritsa, heading towards Dassia.
Urban Bus: No. 7
Departure point: Saroko Square – Stop: Katomeri
Duration: June 26, 2026 – January 11, 2027
National Gallery – Nafplion Annex
One-Day Conference
Femicides and Feminal Arts: From the Grim Reality to Art as Denunciation
The conference aims to inform the public and raise awareness, to foster a meaningful exchange of views and reflections on the tragic reality of gender-based violence and femicide in Greece and around the world, and to highlight ways and means of prevention.
Structured around academic presentations, artistic workshops, a round table, the testimony of a relative of a femicide victim, and a staged reading of Cinglée by Belgian playwright, director and activist Céline Delbecq, who will be attending the event, the conference seeks to raise urgent questions about femicide, past and present. It will focus on the factors that can contribute to prevention and eradication, while also showing how this grim reality often becomes a form of denunciatory creativity in literature and the arts.
Date: Thursday, June 11, 2026
Time: 09:30–20:00
Venue: National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum, Nafplion Annex
Organised, curated, coordinated and implemented by:
Dr Christina A. Oikonomopoulou, Special Educational Staff, Department of Theatre Studies, University of the Peloponnese
[email protected]
Comme un galet d’or / Like a “refined” pebble*
Concert
The National Gallery and its Nafplion Annex celebrate World Music Day with a unique concert dedicated to some of Greece’s foremost poets and composers, as well as to traditional music. The Annex – currently hosting Helene Pavlopoulou’s exhibition Zoephoros – invites visitors to admire twenty-one works of art that converse with historical paintings from the permanent collection.
Greek culture has a long tradition of setting poetry to music. In their new duo, singer Cybèle Castoriadis and guitarist Orestis Kalampalikis present a programme that revisits some of the most beautiful Greek poems ever set to music, from celebrated ones by Elytis, Ritsos, Kavadias, and others, to lesser-known pieces, while also drawing on antiquity and folk poetry. Popular melodies by the greatest composers of our time are interwoven with traditional music, bringing the beauty and poetry of the Greek language to the fore through Orestis’s refined arrangements and Cybèle’s unique voice.
*“A pebble refined down in the deep / plantations and roofs of the glaucous sky”
(The Axion Esti, Odysseus Elytis, in The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris, Johns Hopkins University Press)
Born in Paris, Cybèle Castoriadis took up music and singing at an early age. Her artistic work spans the lyrical repertoire, contemporary music, jazz, and theatre. She has appeared in major theatrical productions in France and performed in concerts in Greece and abroad. Bringing together voice, music, and stage presence, she has developed musical performances and collaborated with acclaimed artists. Her recordings include projects devoted to French song and the international repertoire, alongside more recent works of her own.
Orestis Kalampalikis is a guitarist and composer based in Athens and Paris. His work brings Greek musical influences into dialogue with the language and forms of Western classical music, while developing a personal style and new techniques for the guitar. He studied at the National Conservatory of Athens and later at the Conservatoire national supérieur de Musique de Paris, earning several distinctions. An award-winning composer, he has also written for the theatre. He collaborates with leading artists and has taken part in recordings and concerts. His recorded work includes both his own compositions and collaborations with other artists. In 2024, he recorded one of his works with the Athens State Orchestra.
Date: Sunday, June 21, 2026
Time: 20:00
Venue: National Gallery – Nafplion Annex
National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum – Central Building
Musical Event
Painters and Composers Meeting in Time: Migrant, 20th–21st c.
Athens Classical Players
On June 17, as part of the musical programme Painters and Composers Meeting in Time, the National Gallery hosts Migrant, 20th–21st c., the fourth and final concert in its series with the Athens Classical Players.
In this series of short concerts, masterpieces of classical Western music converse with contemporary works from the Museum’s permanent collection. This meeting highlights the distinctive aesthetic resonance and artistic currents of each century, in both painting and music.
By presenting the musical works and paintings together, the programme allows the audience to better understand the shared ideas, aesthetic elements, and artistic trends of the era. The key elements of the programme are the common techniques of composition and form; the use of colours in painting and timbres in music; and the morphological and stylistic developments of artistic media.
The programme is artistically curated by Iris Louka. The musical works selected are important examples of their time and are thematically linked to the featured works from the Permanent Collection.
4th Concert
Migrant, 20th–21st c.
June 17, 2026, 19:30
National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum, Central Building
Admission to the concert is free.
No seat reservation is required.
An entrance ticket for the Permanent Exhibition of the National Gallery is required.
Featured works
Paintings:
Yannis Moralis, Reminiscence, 1959
Xenofon Bitsikas, The Migrant, 2002
Musical Works
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Sonata for Solo Violin, 1st mvt
Violin: Triantafyllos Loukas
Béla Bartók (1881–1945)
Duos for Two Violins
Violins: Triantafyllos Loukas, Iris Louka
Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)
Sonata for Solo Viola, Op. 25 No. 1
Viola: Iris Louka
Steve Reich (1936–)
Clapping Music
Georges Aperghis (1945–)
Obstinate (2017), for solo double bass
Double bass: Haris Pazaroulas
Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001)
Dhipli Zyia, for violin and cello
Cello: Nora Karakousoglou
Violin: Iris Louka
