The exhibition “GIORGOS TSAKIRIS PAINTING / RETROSPECTIVE” opens on Thursday, December 18, at 8:00 p.m.
The exhibition, organized by the Municipality of Thessaloniki and the Municipal Art Gallery, presents paintings, engravings, drawings, and constructions by artist and Professor Emeritus of the School of Fine Arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Giorgos Tsakiris.

As art historian and exhibition curator Yannis Bolis notes: “The exhibition is a good opportunity to ‘discover’ a different Giorgos Tsakiris through paintings and engravings mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as pencil and pen drawings—an important, though unknown to many, part of his work. In these early works, the artist raises existential and ontological questions, invokes a deeper communication, and proposes a different way of seeing and interpreting life. The sharpness of the design, the violence of the gesture, the intense colors, the distortions, the graphics and abstract simplifications, the expressionist intensity and harshness, but also the pop mood at times, all contribute to the evocative atmosphere of his themes.

In direct correspondence with mental and emotional or social and political situations, with human behaviors, in the process of revealing a hidden meaning, Giorgos Tsakiris presents a world in turmoil, an intermediate world, the stage of an imaginary theater of human life. His most recent series of blue pen drawings brings the painter Tsakiris back to the forefront. A whole new world emerges from these drawings, on the cusp of imagination and dream. A magical, perhaps even post-apocalyptic world inhabited by frogs and dragon snakes, pumpkins, watermelons, mushrooms and cacti, ships, airplanes, and biomorphic motifs, a world of glass structures, sharp knives, and hammers. Images from a fairy tale or a harsh ecological allegory, images that communicate and impose themselves with their exceptional design qualities.

Exhibition organization: Thessaloniki Municipal Art Gallery
Exhibition curator: Yannis Bolis, Art Historian
Communication sponsor: ERT3

Exhibition duration: December 18, 2025, to February 14, 2026
Opening hours: Tue – Fri 10am – 8pm | Sat 10am – 6pm | Closed on Sun & Mon
Opening: Thursday, December 18, 2025, at 8pm | Free admission