Whenever an exhibition by Yiannoulis Halepas is organized in Tinos, it cannot avoid the special emotional charge that is diffused on the island of marble, marble workers and Megalochari. A legendary story of sculpture that fascinates experts and non-specialists alike and has a decisive influence on the Tinian people. The Tinian Culture Foundation presents a new exhibition that brings together for the first time two important collections of works by our leading sculptor.

The exhibition “Chalepas – Sculpture’s Greatest Lesson” from 10 June to 16 October 2023, makes Chalepas’ presence more intense this summer on his island of Tinos.

In Chora, the Chalepas Collection of the Panhellenic Holy Foundation of Evangelistria Tinos, housed in the Foundation of Tinian Culture (I.TH.P.), includes the most important set of sculptures from the sculptor’s first and mainly second period, when he returned to the island after his incarceration in the Corfu Psychiatric Hospital in 1902. There he created a work different from that of his youth with a special significance for modern Greek sculpture. “His present works display primitive art. In them I distinguished the line, imagination and tendency of modern art”, wrote the sculptor Thomas Thomopoulos in 1922 when he visited him in Tinos. And also “It will be an honour for Greece, for the whole world and above all for Tinos, to take care of the preservation of the work of Chalepas”. Among these, the impressive Fairy Tale of the Fivefold, Satyr and Eros (three great early versions), the Sleeping Ariadne, the Herodias, Alexander the Great alive and dead, two-faced works, are treasures and reference works for modern Greek sculpture.

Η αδελφή του καλλιτέχνη, Κατερίνα, 1876-1877, γύψος, 49x21x21 εκ., Αθήνα, Συλλογή Ιδρύματος Ωνάση / The artist’s sister, Katerina, 1876-1877, plaster, 49x21x21 cm, Athens, Onassis Foundation Collection

The collection of the Onassis Foundation, the largest group of works by Halepas (more than thirty) gave the impetus in 2022 at the Telloglio Foundation in Thessaloniki for the major exhibition “Yiannoulis Halepas: Giving and Receiving”, with sculptures, drawings and archival material on the artist. The Onassis Foundation’s collection essentially brings together most of the works in the collection of Vassilis and Irini Halepas, the sculptor’s nieces and nephews, who in August 1930 brought him to live with them in Athens, in the house on Dafnimolis Street, where the artist lived for the last eight years of his life until September 1938.

The present exhibition Halepas – Sculpture as a Major Lesson from 11 June to 16 October 2023 comes to unite primarily these two extremely important collections of the artist’s work, the collection of the THP and the collection of the Onassis Foundation (a total of more than 40 sculptures). Both collections include works from the first (Sleeping Beauty era) and especially the second period (Tinos) of Halepa.

Oedipus and Antigone, autograph, 1930. Plaster, 77x35x45 cm, Athens, Onassis Foundation Collection

Important works from the artist’s first period (1868-1878) that ‘return’ to Tinos to meet Philostorgia, exhibited in Tinos, include the famous portrait of his sister Katerina and the bust of Demetrios Poliorcetes, as well as the small head of Koris (the last from the collection of Yannis Gaitis), works that accompanied him when he returned to the island after the mental hospital in Corfu (1902-1930) and gave the impetus for many of his later creations in Tinos and Athens. Most important are the works from his period in Tinos at the Onassis Foundation, The Tale of the Shapeshifter in clay, The Genoese and her Executioners (clay), The Hekatogchir (plaster), as well as two new acquisitions of the Onassis Foundation, The Secret (plaster, pre-1927) and the portrait of Kalliope Papadimitrakopoulou (plaster, c. 1924).

The “Greatest Lesson in Sculpture” (according to Dim. Pikionis) is about approaching and understanding the sculptor’s creative process, especially when he returns to the island and his art after a dramatic break of 40 years. What reasons, what circumstances, why he turned to clay and where he led his art leading to the important works of the last period he sculpted in Athens. Despite the difficulties, old and new in his life, we watch the ‘new’ Halepas emerge with a staggering effort and commitment to researching the ‘essence’ of sculpture as he understood it.

The exhibition “Halepas – Sculpture’s greatest lesson” is under the auspices of the A.E. of the President of the Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou.

Παραμύθι της Πεντάμορφης ΙΙ, 1918, γύψος, 80x109x90 εκ., Συλλογή ΠΙΙΕΤ, Μόνιμη Έκθεση ΙΤΗΠ

The exhibition is organized by the Foundation of Tinian Culture, with the support of the Onassis Foundation and the collaboration of the Telloglio Foundation for the Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Venue, address.

Exhibition curator: Alexandra Goulaki-Voutyra, M.Sc., M.Sc., Tinos. Professor of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, General Director of the Telloglio Foundation

Duration of the exhibition: 10 June – 16 October 2023

Opening hours: Monday, Wednesday & Thursday 9:00 – 14:30, Friday – Sunday 10:00 – 14:00 & 19:00 – 21:30