Myrto Xanthopoulou, represented by Citronne gallery, is the winner of the Art Athina award for new artists, which is being presented for the fourth year and aims to promote artistic creation as an institution of the fair.

The award, which consists of an individual presentation of the artist’s work at the MOMus-Alex Mylonas Museum in 2026, was announced on Friday, September 19, by a member of the evaluation committee and representative of MOMus, Yannis Bolis.

Based on the terms of participation in the institution, artists up to 45 years of age who live and work in Greece and are nominated by the gallery that represents them, where they have held at least one solo exhibition, were eligible to apply for the award. The institution is an initiative of the Panhellenic Association of Art Galleries, while Art Athina is collaborating for the fourth time with MOMus-Alex Mylonas Museum, one of the five museums of the Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (MOMus).

After examining the 14 proposals submitted by the candidates for the award and the art galleries representing them, and following a discussion, it was unanimously decided to award the prize to Myrto Xanthopoulou.

The five-member evaluation committee for the award consisted of:

Polina Kosmadaki (Art Historian and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Benaki Museum)

Christoforos Marinos (Art Historian and Curator)

Thouli Misirloglou (Art Historian and Artistic Director of MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Collections)

Yannis Bolis (Art Historian and Head of the Contemporary Sculpture Department at MOMus-Alex Mylonas Museum)

Anna Mykoniati (Art Historian and Curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST)

Committee’s Rationale

According to the committee’s assessment, Myrto Xanthopoulou’s work is developed with consistency and coherence and is characterized by the breadth and multiplicity of its artistic media—installations, constructions, drawings, videos, performances. She shows a particular interest in the use of language as an expressive tool, while all kinds of consumable materials and disposable everyday objects are a key element of her work. With a reflective and at the same time melancholic or playful mood, she creates environments from small gestures in which she subverts and transforms the facts of reality, while capturing the power of detail and minimalism as well as her physical engagement with the materials. The concept of the archive, multiple meanings, and the poles of opposites also play a decisive role in her proposals. The award gives her the opportunity to present her work in a museum, the MOMus-Alex Mylonas Museum, which is delighted to welcome the artist.

Myrto Xanthopoulou-Bio

Myrto Xanthopoulou was born in Helsinki in 1981. She lives and works in Athens. She studied fine arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts and art history at Deree. Her works are characterized by everyday, often humble materials, the manual element, and the use of language. They are installations, drawings, constructions, and videos that attempt to articulate a poetics of the insignificant and the familiar, the weightless and the frivolous. In 2022, she presented her fifth solo exhibition in Athens, entitled KATAGIDA (I don’t have a pen), curated by Christoforos Marinos, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects in Greece and abroad, in museums, galleries, and independent art spaces. In 2020, she received the SNF ARTWORKS fellowship.