The Hellenic American Union presents the exhibition “Shadows” as a tribute to the great director of Greek origin, John Cassavetes, in the framework of the 37th European Film Panorama. Four young artists, Alexandros Vergis, Katerina Christopoulou, Vassilis Paphilis and Virginia Axiotis, illuminate with their works a world of shadows, the filmic world of John Cassavetes, curated by the great painter Yannis Psychopedis.

The exhibition opens on Monday, October 21, 2024, at 19:30, at the Hadjikyriakos-Gikas Gallery of the Hellenic American Union (Massalias 22, Athens) and will last till November the 9th, 2024.

John Cassavetes’ film Shadows (1959) becomes an object and a field of encounter between painting and cinema. This exhibition creates a fruitful dialogue between the cinematic black and white atmosphere of the late 1950s and the vivid, colourful visual language of a new era, the present one. As Yannis Psychopedis notes: “Cassavetes, the radical, pioneering filmmaker with his simple, improvisational, anthropocentric film form, provides with his film the raw material and the occasions to transform his “Shadows” into a painterly feast of colours, forms, techniques and unique materials. The film’s fluid black and white images, improvised rhythms, expressive freedom, interpersonal conflicts and emotional tensions are translated here by the four creators with a visual vocabulary full of colour pulse, unpredictable material functions, free painterly improvisations and a vivid, plastic feeling.”

In the context of the exhibition and shortly before its closing, on Friday, November 8 at 19:00, John Cassavetes’ film “Shadows” will be screened at the Hellenic American Union Theatre with free admission.