The Cultural Foundation of Tinos is organizing a retrospective exhibition of Babis Retzepopoulos (1940-2002) from 7 June to 14 September 2025. The exhibition, entitled “Ideas and Incidents”, includes works from the period 1957-1994. The retrospective includes four works by the engraver A. Tassos, who was Retzepopoulos’ teacher at the Doxiadis School.

The painter, engraver and graphic artist Babis Retzepopoulos came into the world when light was fighting against darkness. He was born on 27 December 1940 in Athens, two months after the outbreak of the Greek-Italian War and shortly before the occupation of his country by the occupying forces. This archetypal dipole, light and darkness, light in darkness, the path from darkness to light, would form the main axis of his artistic thought and creation.

Already from his first paintings, Retzepopoulos impresses with the way he handles colour and, above all, with his willingness to experiment. His compositions are well-crafted, robust and layered, as are the prints he would begin to make in the years to come. Looking at the paintings of the 1960-63 period, you would think that this young artist was treating human figures as still lifes and still lifes as animate entities. In the following years, he would devote himself almost exclusively to printmaking, graphic design and the decoration of commercial shops in Athens. When he returned to painting again, during the period when he was living permanently in Paris (1967-73) and now signed as Ch. Babis R., his compositions differed markedly from those of the early 1960s. The colour palette changes, becoming softer, while he seems to be more interested in the movement of volumes and the relationships they develop between them, the way they penetrate each other, creating depth and the illusion of three-dimensional space. You get the impression that these works resemble schematic city plans.

Of the wood engravings that he made while living in Athens, during his studies at the Doxiadis School and later (1962-67), we know of about twenty. During his stay in Paris (1968-73) and in the early years of the post-war period (1975-78), when he settled in Tinos and ran the gallery “The Shop” with Lefteris Kritikos, he created forty more woodcuts of a figurative nature. Retzepopoulos’s printmaking acquires a different and certainly closer relationship with light when, in the late 1980s, he adopts an abstract style – a bold, original approach that is distinguished for its poetic quality. She finds trunks of old olive trees and uses their perforated cross-sections as matrices, after having thoroughly smoothed their surface. She thus abandons pear or ash wood and the engraving of a design or a representation and gives first place to chance. Printing on large format papers, up to 150 cm in height or width, he creates a total of six sections over a five-year period.

The basic feature of Retzepopoulos’ abstract prints is the play with light and darkness, between the black of the printed form and the white of the Japanese paper. Here, the engraving becomes a game, a variation on the same theme. What would A. Tassos (1914-1985) have said if he had seen the abstract prints of his talented student? The renowned and respected engraver depicted tree trunks in 1950 (two anthropomorphic olive trees that look like they are dancing) and in 1980-81. The difference, however, is that in his abstract prints Regepopoulos does not simply depict trunks; the tree is not the exclusive subject of the work. In his hands, the wooden trunk becomes a stamp, an expressive medium, a representational tool and source, a metaphor for the body, for the relationship between printmaking and music, dance and mourning. With these works, which praise black in an era when colour is universally prevalent, Regepopoulos brings the medium of printmaking closer to painting, highlighting its expanded character.

As Philippos Pierros, President of the Board of Directors of the Cultural Foundation of Tinos, notes in his introduction to the brochure accompanying the exhibition:

“Babi’s paintings fascinate with their pure colours, as earthly depictions, the tender style of a peculiar post-Cubism, pictorial and Chapoval (Youla Chapoval) idiom, the Byzantine-tropical nuances. His compositions invite you to expand the spirit, to guess, to decipher the abstract arrangements and in the end to assemble the messages of a restless yet pioneering artistic spirit. It has been written that his creations allude to the style of Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika. In my humble opinion they refer to an agonizing attempt to synthesize layers, intersections and overlaps into a structured yet abstract whole. At the same time, Regepopoulos’ woodcuts exude an expressive Greece, a living Tinos, a dancing mood of symmetry and a harmonious dialogue between black and white. They challenge the viewer to a dialogue, to associative thoughts in search of forms and messages. His emblematic individual creations – “Dance”, “Form”, ‘Encounters’, “Musical Instrument” – are unique poetic expressions both in terms of technique and artistic ethos.

With this exhibition, the Cultural Foundation of Tinos revives for the second time, even if only temporarily – after the first successful exhibition in 2008 – the first Tinian gallery, “The Shop”, which hosted and highlighted the genius of Babis Retzepopoulos and enriched the cultural resources of the blessed island. We believe it is the best way to pay tribute to the great artist and at the same time preserve in historical memory his contribution to art.”

Babis Retzepopoulos was born in 1940 in Athens, where he also passed away in 2002. After attending drawing classes at the workshop of Panos Sarafianos and Vrasidas Vlachopoulos (1957–60), he studied Graphic Arts at the School of Decorative Arts of the Athens Technological Institute (1960–63), under the guidance of A. Tassos. He continued with advanced studies in fine arts and engraving techniques (Cours supérieurs d’arts et de techniques graphiques) at the École Estienne in Paris (1967–68).He held the following solo exhibitions: Woodcuts, Commercial Bank for Northern Europe / Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord (BCEN), Paris, 1968; Woodcuts, Nuits des Puces, Paris, 1969 & 1970; Woodcuts, “To Magazi”, Tinos, 1976 & 1978; Walk from 1962 – Woodcuts, “Ekfrasi” Gallery, Glyfada, 1988; Babis R. – Woodcuts, French Institute, Thessaloniki, 1990; The Last “Walk” – Woodcuts, Cultural Center, Cultural Organization of the Municipality of Athens – PODA, Athens, 2004; Walk Among Unknown Forms: The Woodcuts of Babis Retzepopoulos, Town Hall of the 3rd District, Paris, 2005; Meeting Babis Retzepopoulos: Painting – Engraving, Foundation of Tinian Culture, Tinos, 2008; “Ideas and Incidents”, Municipal Gallery of Athens, Athens, 2025.In 1975, together with his close friend Lefteris Kritikos, he founded the historic gallery “To Magazi” in Chora, Tinos. His works can be found in the National Library of France (Prints Department), the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum, the American College of Greece, and in private collections in Europe and the USA.

The exhibition is curated by art historian Christoforos Marinos.

The exhibition is accompanied by a three hundred page trilingual catalogue (Greek, French, English), designed by Ioannis Markakis (OUTIS Publications), with texts by the curator of the exhibition and the publication Christoforos Marinos, Savvas Apergis, Irini Horati, Lena Retzepopoulou, Praxitelis Tzanoulinos, Markos Toufeklis and Marguerite Halatzian.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the A. Tassos Society for Visual Arts.

Cultural Foundation of Tinos opening hours:

Monday, Wednesday& Thursday: 9:00 – 14:30

Friday, Saturday& Sunday: 10:00 – 14:00 & 19:00 – 21:30

CULTURAL FOUNDATION OF TINOS

GR-842 00, Akti Drosou, Tinos Island

Τ: (+30)22830 29070 

e-mail: [email protected], www.itip.gr