The exhibition “In the workshop of Christoforos Katsadiotis” is presented at the Benaki Museum / Pireos 138, opens on Wednesday 28 May 2025 at 20:00 and will run until Sunday 27 July 2025. The exhibition is curated by art historian George Mylonas.

Christoforos Katsadiotis sets up a monumental workshop, a hybrid space where the art of engraving finds new boundaries. His works are framed by the very materials that make up his work: notes, clippings, photographs, objects he has collected from the garbage – “parasites” of the city that are recycled into engravings. Together, video and sound complete an original audiovisual visual experience. In this personal cabinet de curiosités, the idiosyncratic animation proposed by the restless creator functions as an extension of the printmaking. It gives movement to stillness, voice to silence. Katsadiotis’ works acquire autonomy, like scenes of an underground film, a narrative that does not imply but reveals.

The exhibition presents eight animations of engravings, one in 360-degree projection, while engravings and metal oxidized matrices are also on display. A special place is occupied by a monumental installation specially designed for the exhibition space: a peculiar artistic “carousel” of poems, photographs of artworks by other artists from different movements, torn paper, book pages, broken toys, as well as litter – plastic from beaches, rubbish gathered from Paris and Athens. It is an environment that articulates a poetic synthesis of remnants, a spatial narrative that abolishes the boundaries between the personal and the collective, the old and the new, the beautiful and the discarded.

Christoforos Katsadiotis divides his time between Paris and Athens; he prepares his engraving matrices in France and prints them manually in his Athenian studio. There, amidst the smells of acids and chemicals, old radios and stacks of paper, unclassifiable figures are born. Faces animal-like, distorted, pulled out of some dark fairy tale or allegory. They have no heroism, no claim to redemption. They are the “stateless” of everyday life – faces of decadence, of bingeing, of marginality. And yet, in them Katsadiotis finds “the rage for life”. The dichotomy between beauty and pain. In these faces he recognizes everyday heroes, those who survive without belonging anywhere.

Curated by: George Mylonas

Architectural Design: Spyros Nasenas