On Thursday, April 27th, the exhibition entitled “Plastic – Copper” will be open to the public and will run until July 30th, 2023 at the Benaki Museum in Zografou’s workshop.

We rarely encounter museum exhibitions whose title refers to the technique itself rather than to theoretical parameters or the aesthetic and social dimension of art.

The exhibition “plastic-Chalcochytic” inaugurates a series of exhibitions that aim to bring together the School of Fine Arts and the Benaki Museum, in order to rekindle a relationship that existed for all the period during which Yannis Pappas taught (1953-1978) at the Athens School of Fine Arts. The revival of the ancient art of plastic-copper and the method of lost wax in Greece is mainly due to the vision of Yannis Pappas to build an artistic Foundry in Greece for the first time since antiquity, and indeed in the area of the School of Fine Arts in the late 50s, since until then all bronze works of Greek creators bore the stamp of foreign foundries.

In the building that was the residence of the family of the great Greek creator until the 1960s and his workshop “Unite” the studies of the students with the applications of plastic and copper-based art that Yiannis Pappas introduced again in education. The exhibition is curated by Markos Georgilakis, associate professor at the Visual Arts Department of the Athens School of Fine Arts and the artist Thodoris Bargiotas.

Mr. Georgilakis gave an exclusive tour of the exhibition at the Days of Art, which he described as “the creative dialogue between the students ‘ works and the broad work of Pappas”. The excellent meeting between them is a special opportunity for the visitor to come into substantial contact with the arts of plastic and copper-making.as Mr. Georgilakis mentioned, the students thoroughly process wax, which has played the most important role as a material in copper-making. “Every material, wax and copper otherwise reflects the light, otherwise it is illuminated, otherwise it behaves.”

And in the catalogue of the exhibition in the analytical text of the same that is published for the first time talking about the materials he says : “the material is both an essential and decisive element of the result, since sculpture is nothing but the material substance of the intention or inspiration of the artist”

In the exhibition works on a regular and small scale come into harmonious correlation with the broad work of Yannis Pappas while at the same time a series of drawings of students is presented because as the sculpture student of the ASFA and participant in the exhibition, George Papadomanolakis, aptly expressed to us, the physical and conceptual order in creation is : “thought – design – materiality – three-dimensional”.

The research exhibition is framed by the excellent documentary “copper and fire”, in collaboration with the Educational Exhibition in which Markos Georgilakis presents in detail, with special details, the method of chalcochytics at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

Benaki Museum / Giannis Pappas workshop I Anacreonou 38, Zografou I 210 7773946

I Opening Hours:

Tuesday, Friday & Sunday:10:00-14: 00,

Monday, Wednesday, Thursday & Saturday: closed

I Admission Free