From 01.04.2025 to 31.10.2025
To mark the centenary of Panayiotis Tetsis’s birth, the National Gallery in Athens presents a major retrospective exhibition titled ‘The Obsession of the Gaze.’ This comprehensive tribute to the distinguished Greek artist opens on 10 April 2025 at 7.30 p.m., in the temporary exhibition space of the Anthony E. Komninos Foundation Gallery.
A painter, printmaker, teacher, and academician, Panayiotis Tetsis served as both chairman of the Artistic Committee and president of the Board of Directors of the National Gallery. Regarded as a pre-eminent figure in post-war Greek art, he helped shape the development of contemporary art in Greece through both his practice and his teaching.
In addition to presenting the arc of his artistic career, this exhibition also aims to highlight his distinctive gaze – an approach that placed particular emphasis on light and colour in his treatment of subject matter.
‘Street Market’ and ‘Hydra’ introduce visitors to Tetsis’s world, before taking a deep dive into his body of work. The exhibition traces a thematic rather than strictly chronological path, enabling visitors to discover the artist’s unique visual idiom and how he observed the world around him, transforming it into art – paintings, prints, watercolours, and pastels. As we come to know Tetsis’s pictorial cosmos, we realise that these thematic threads often align with distinct chronological periods. For lengthy spans of time – often four years or longer – he would immerse himself almost obsessively in a single subject. This gave rise to distinct series of works, such as footballers, gardens, balcony doors, chairs, shipyards, the landscapes of Sifnos and Hydra, the street market, tables, boats, seas, portraits of friends, still lifes, pine trees, and lastly, the rocks of Hydra.
These painting series are complemented by works in other media – ink drawings, prints, watercolours – all of which the artist viewed as communicating vessels. By working in this way, he was able to explore a subject and its depiction from multiple angles and perspectives.
The exhibition brings together 160 works, mostly paintings, along with prints, watercolours, and pastels. The majority come from the artist’s generous donations to the National Gallery between 1997 and 2015, with a further 64 works drawn from institutional and private collections. The selection aims to highlight his intensely focused gaze – the way he observed his surroundings and translated them into visual language – or reveal lesser-known facets of his artistic output and stylistic development.
Curator: Efi Agathonikou
Duration: April – October 2025
