With echoes from France’s Côte d’Azur and post-war Europe in general, to the other side of the Atlantic and consumer society, the two new exhibitions at MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, entitled “Martial Raysse. Sinéma” & “European Pop. The Battle of Realisms and Narratives,” and featuring artists who were already searching for the new in the 1960s, are not only presented simultaneously in the space, but also function as a basis and continuation for each other, with pop aesthetics, films, painting, color, humor, and many kinds of realism and artistic sensibilities.

The two exhibitions, which will be open to the public from February 11 to April 12, 2026 (opening: February 18, 7:30 p.m.) are part of the MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2026 production cycle, with the aim of reframing the international character of its permanent collections.

Exhibition «Martial Raysse. Sinéma»

11 February– 12 April 2026

MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art (HELEXPO, Thessaloniki)

Opening Night: Wednesday 18 February 2026, 19:30

The world of Martial Raysse (Golfe-Juan, France, 1936), one of the most inventive artists of post-war European art, oscillates between dream and reality.

From the fluorescent objects and pop aesthetics of the 1960s, when European and American art was searching for new forms and new languages, to his outdoor works and masked portraits, his career to date has been a continuous search between pop aesthetics, social observation, and personal immersion in art, with clear phases and transformations. Raysse’s art speaks of life and imagination and is a constant interplay between extroversion and introversion, social criticism and the personal magic of art.

Constantly devoted to art and to renewing his media, materials, and practices, he is always experimenting. Behind his paintings, he often hides altered photographs, moving from painting to cinema and from cinema to painting.

The core of the exhibition “Martial Raysse. Sinéma” is his lesser-known work, which concerns films and videos: where his art meets experimental cinema in the use of color, materiality, and everyday life as fields of experimentation. An exceptional self-taught craftsman, alert to the new technologies of the time, Raysse makes the most of the enormous possibilities offered by the innovative audiovisual medium from the early days of color television.

The human form, landscapes, mythology, humor, and the social and consumerist reality of the 1960s, influenced by advertising, pop culture, and mass production, are constantly present, alongside multiple technical effects in his personal color language, “Martialcolor,” which reflects the intensity of pop art and the spectacular exaggeration of Technicolor cinema. Film and video, which transcend traditional production techniques, become a new way of painting. The exhibition invites visitors to discover how the artist expands his visual and conceptual research through the moving image, presenting films and videos created between 1966 and 2008. Between poetry, provocation, and formal freedom, his films reveal a coherent and thoroughly contemporary body of work, in which every image—static or moving—participates in an overall reflection on representation and our relationship with reality.

“Cinema, for me, is like a seismological recording of all the images that pass through my mind,” he said.

For the first time in Greece, Martial Raysse’s subversive moving image works reveal an unknown side of a pioneering artist, as well as the intersection of moving and painted images, where video and cinema become material, gesture, and tool for redefining contemporary visual culture.

The exhibition is co-organized with the Fonds Martial Raysse.

Curated by Thouli Misirloglou, Artistic Director of MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art-Collections of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Museum of Contemporary Art

Assistant curator: Thodoris Markoglou

“European Pop. The battle of realisms and narratives”

February 11 – April 12, 2026

MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art (inside TIF-HELEXPO, Thessaloniki)

Opening Night: February 18, 2026, 7:30 p.m.

How do we understand the human form, society, and the role of art in social change? After the abstract trends that dominated art until the 1950s, recognizable images and forms returned in the 1960s and 1970s, offering alternative narratives. At the heart of the need for a renewal of realism and expressiveness in the image, in a world that was moving away from the fundamental need of art to represent human existence, many artists challenged the traditional values of society and the art world.

New narratives rendered moments of everyday life, commented on social or political issues, recognised the influence of advertising, mass culture and the media, and reflected the speed, contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary life. New forms of realism emerged, not as a copy of reality, but as a representation of the individual’s inner psychological conflict and social failures.

The exhibition takes a journey through works and artists from across Europe that highlight the battle of representational narratives and shed new light on the world of reality and objects. All of them were either associated with movements such as Nouvelle Figuration or the New Realists group in France, or their work is influenced by them.

The legacy of their work, in the way it evokes social alienation, political upheaval, and the contradictions of human nature, retains its power not only as a historical artistic phenomenon, but also as a compass for contemporary art and life.

The works presented in the exhibition come from the collections of MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as from private collections.

Curator: Thouli Misirloglou, Artistic Director of MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art-Collections of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Museum of Contemporary Art

Assistant curator: Katerina Syroglou

Artists: Arman, Eduardo Arroyo, Daniel (Panagopoulos), Erik Dietman, Erró, Hervé Fischer, Raymond Hains, Nikos Kessanlis, Peter Klasen, Jacques Monory, Pavlos (Dionysopoulos), Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Chrysa Romanou, Antonio Segui, Vasilis Skylakos, Yvon Taillandier, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé.