“A journey into color”! This is the exhibition by Alexis Akrithakis – A Wave Line at the Benaki Museum.

The exhibition presents more than 250 selected works from private and public collections, covering all of the artist’s creative periods, presented chronologically. Visitors can follow the course of the artist’s work, his concerns and his inspirations. Suitcases, travel, hearts, airplanes, the artist’s favorite themes, recur throughout his work, unfolding the adventure of painting, materials, and construction, and highlighting his unique sense of color.

The exhibition is structured into major thematic sections covering some of the artist’s creative periods. The psychedelic tempera paintings of the 1960s, the intensely political works of the early 1970s, the suitcase of the 1970s, the constructions with wood from the sea and homemade lamps of the 1980s, the enlargements and repetitions of the 1990s, and his heartbreaking last works, portraits of the insane and inmates of the Dromokaiteio mental hospital, form the basic framework of the exhibition. However, the presentation is complemented by smaller collections of special works that were exhibited in separate exhibitions by the artist himself, such as kites, the circus series, the airplanes, the flowers in the suicides, and others that illuminate his multidimensional sensitivity to reality and his critical stance toward pomposity.

The curators of the exhibition have let Akritakis’s own words “speak” for his artistic career. After all, as curator Alexios Papazacharias pointed out, “This is an exhibition to be seen.” The texts in the exhibition are the artist’s own words, highlighting his concerns, inspirations, and thoughts.

On the occasion of the exhibition, AGRA Publications released the accompanying volume Alexis Akrithakis – A Line Like a Wave, edited by Chloe Akrithaki and Alexios Papazacharias. It is an extensive and multi-layered publication documenting the work and career of one of the most iconic artists of contemporary Greek art.