Anniversary - Vlassis Caniaris´ eightieth birthday

On the occasion of Vlassis Caniaris’ eightieth birthday, the Benaki Museum is organising a retrospective exhibition of this distinguished exponent of the Greek avant-garde, who was such a catalytic influence in the so-called sixties generation.

With 1948 acting as a symbolic starting point, the artist's oeuvre is proposed through time, in correlation with the permanent exhibits of the Benaki Museum, which, in tandem, proclaim the continuity of Greek art through time. Thus figures, images and tableaux vivants, formed of rags, old objects, plaster casts or wire, are contrasted to creations from the early Bronze Age, the Geometric and Archaic Period, the classical era, the Byzantine Era or the folk art of Post–Byzantine Greece.

Finally, special emphasis is placed on drawings made by Vlassis Kaniaris from 1947 to the nineteen sixties. From a corpus of thousands of sketch-notes, about 200 were selected that include croquis, models for performances and films, book covers, magazine illustrations, construction notes or the first impressions of a future work.

The exhibition constitutes a wager, which is also a game between science, the history of art, museum curating and the ideologicalisation of art.

Anniversary
Vlassis Caniaris´ eightieth birthday

Kurator: Manos Stefanidis