On Tuesday, February 17, 2026, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., Katia Varvaki’s solo exhibition “Eros and Psyche” will open at the Café of the National Archaeological Museum, curated by Iris Kritikou and organized by Emilia Kougia.

In her new series of works, “Eros and Psyche,” which is an iconographic inspiration and organic reference to her favorite exhibits from the classical, Hellenistic, and Roman collections of the National Archaeological Museum, Katia Varvaki once again engages with issues of the coexistence of the material, spiritual, and psychic worlds. With the unresolved issues of Love and Beauty, dreams, the subconscious and the conscious, desire and rejection, trial and redemption, eternal youth and relentless time, mortality and immortality.

The title of the exhibition is linked both to the eponymous short story by Apuleius from the 2nd century BC and to the relevant iconography that has appeared in Greek art since the 4th century BC. This theme, interspersed with Neoplatonic elements and allegories, has been a source of inspiration in literature, theater, and music, as well as in painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts throughout the centuries (Molière, Claude Debussy, Raphael, Antonio Canova, Edward Burne-Jones, etc.), refers to the adventures of love, the overcoming of difficulties, the testing of the soul, transcendent beauty, and sacred union.

The curator of the exhibition, archaeologist and art historian Iris Kritikou, notes: “Katia Varvaki’s works for this section, starting from the myth of a divine encounter and the negotiation of the ideal of indelible love, unfold within a suspended narrative framework that, using Plato’s Phaedrus method, speaks in a broader and symbolic way about the painful ascent of the winged soul, about communion with eternity and the divine. Placed in an abstract locus amoenus—a paper meadow of painful craftsmanship— the central heroines with their flowing hair emerge from vases, sculptures, white-coated clay votive offerings, and melancholic reliefs on the walls, spelling out ancient beauty and caressing our mortal gaze.

Their transitional transparent material, sculpted with flexible forms and rosy tones from skillfully matched and colorfully unprocessed pages of women’s fashion and beauty magazines, with unparalleled grace and exuberant artistic talent, meets the almost invisible. Their palimpsestic fields, with their inventive kaleidoscopic compositions, are complemented by smaller wall works that render improvised mythical snapshots with vivid colors and successive designs. Sea sirens and nymphs of the Arcadian forest, winged goddesses and aglae demigoddesses, but also contemporary dynamic female figures that we may have encountered somewhere before, complete Varvaki’s poetic pictorial universe. Finally, extending her search for the myth’s myth into the third dimension, the painter also invents a primitive series of fascinating vessel drawings, which, also in free dialogue with the Museum’s exhibits, trace the archetypal myth as elegant fragments, deciphering and illuminating cracks and signs, searching like a delicate thread for a hidden gate in the garden of the labyrinth.

The Exhibition:

Katia Varvaki “Eros and Psyche”

Solo art exhibition at the Café of the National Archaeological Museum

Curator: Iris Kritikou

Organized by: Emilia Kougia

Opening: Tuesday, 17 February 2026 17:00-19:00

Duration till 10 March 2026

Opening Hours: 8:30-15:00 and on Tuesdays 13:00-20:00