The Benaki Museum Shop and NOMAS Publications are collaborating and presenting at 3 Kriezotou Street four selected prints of drawings by Dimitris Papaioannou from the collectible edition Sketches from Life. The works are available to the public for the first time, exclusively from the Gkika Gallery Shop. The edition Sketches from Life is the result of an initiative by the publishers of NOMAS, Giannis Bournias and Lina Stefanou, with artistic curation by the creator.

This particular edition gives us the opportunity to explore the artist’s reconnection with painting and drawing, which are embedded in all his stage creations as the raw material of the creative process. “Life drawing — what we called ‘Nude at Night’ at the Athens School of Fine Arts — was my favorite exercise when I was nineteen, as a student. Every afternoon there was a nude body in the center of an amphitheater full of clothed bodies. On the beach, we are all naked… Although most of the drawings are done quickly — or even in a flash, depending on the hyperactivity level of the unsuspecting model — in the end, they are testimonies of slow time within the Cycladic landscape. There and then, the beauty of everything is revealed…” “The history of human art seems to be an attempt to understand who we are and what our place is in the world. We measure things by our personal scale. The depiction of the world has value as a process of human self-knowledge. Therefore, to depict your own species, that is, humans, seems to be the permanent exercise in painting. From the beginning until now.”