By Venia Pastaka

Art Historian

An exceptional exhibition dedicated to the important painter Panayiotis Tetsis (1925 – 2016) opens on 10 April at the National Gallery, curated by Efi Agathonikos.

Works from the whole spectrum of his artistic career unfold a life course dedicated to painting. The exhibition includes 160 works, most of which belong to the collection of the National Gallery and have been donated by the artist himself (he has donated a total of 224 works to the Gallery), while 64 come from private collections and foundations.

Panayiotis Tetsis was an academic, an artist, a teacher at the Athens School of Fine Arts, President of the Artistic Committee and the Board of Directors of the National Gallery. A lover of colour, he found an occasion for painting even in the simplest subject. Starting from his saying “What I paint is me”, the visitor is introduced to the artist’s visual world, learns about his early stimuli and follows how his eye was shaped over the years. From the emblematic Street Market and the multiple variations of his favourite islands, Hydra and Sifnos, the amazing era of Paris, the portraits of his friends, the views of Athens, the still lifes and flowers of his favourite people, the commissioned works such as the one in Kathimerini and Mont Parnes, the boats and the seas, his prints and watercolours are presented.

The exhibition does not follow a strict chronological order, something he avoided doing when he was alive as he did not recognize periods, since it was not rare for a work he had started in the 1950s to be completed in the 2010s. In this way, a painterly microcosm is created, an immersion in the artist’s psyche that aims to better understand his work and his temperament. Extremely interesting are his famous “Black” works, a visual translation of how the sunlight is translated in terms of colour when it is at its peak, burning the surfaces, as well as the amazing psychographic sculptural portrait of Praxitelis Tzanoulinos, which captures the figure of the important teacher exactly as he was, sweet and noble, for anyone who knew him.