Exhibition by Dimitris Papaioannou

A graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts and a student of Yannis Tsarouchis, founder of the Edafos Dance Theatre and creator of the iconic Opening Ceremony of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, with more than thirty productions to his name, and the first artist to collaborate with Tanztheater Wuppertal after the death of Pina Bausch, Papaioannou has developed an instantly recognizable creative language.

Spanning four decades of creation, the exhibition presents his visual art, the source that predates his stage work, interacts with it, and evolves alongside it. Bringing its different forms together within a single universe, the exhibition encompasses the full breadth of his interdisciplinary and cross-artistic practice: installations, sculptures, drawings, sketches, comics, paintings, archival material, and new commissions created especially for the occasion.

From the groundbreaking comics of the 1980s, the underground aesthetic and post-punk influences, to eroticism and a queer perspective, from political dimensions and collective memory to Greekness—not as national identity but as lived experience—and through to his new sculptural installations, the exhibition at Onassis Ready reveals the deep connections running through his work over the past four decades. Raw matter, light and darkness, beauty and decay compose a world in which the body remains the central point of reference.