Athens, 1950. Visual artist and poet. Costis studied in Athens and Paris. In 1969 his first collage is published and he has his first solo exhibition, showcasing lead sculptures. He is the editor of two literary and art magazines published in Athens, Lotus (Λωτός, 1968-1972) and Praxis (Πράξη 1972). His first book of poetry is published in Athens in February 1974. Since 1970, he has been a regular contributor of essays, articles, poems, and drawings to many important magazines. In 1975 his first Performance takes place at an art gallery in Athens. In 1976, using synthi100, he creates the music score of his film Saga of a city. The same year he starts creating mixed works of visual poetry. From 1986 onward, the lightning phenomenon is at the core of his research. A prolific artist, Costis has had 30 solo shows in galleries and museums in Europe and has participated in more than 100 international group shows. He has also engaged in a variety of projects and conferences / symposia on art, New Technologies, and poetry. Work by the artist is held in public museums and private collections, most notably in Greece, France, Belgium, and Germany.

Born in 1980, in Athens (GR), Marianna Lourba is an MA graduate (Visual Design) of IED (Instituto Europeo di Design) in Milano, Italy. She has also studied Αrt and Design at Middlesex University of London and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons). She works mainly with photography, silkscreen and collage. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo shows internationally in Αthens (GR), New York (US), Tokyo (JP), Arezzo (IT), Orvietto (IT), among others. She has received many awards and honors for her work such as DESTE Foundation, Μont Blanc, Cosmote etc . Since 2012 Lourba’s art object series have been part of the permanent collection of Benaki Museum Art Shop, Athens. For the past seven years she has been a lecturer on Art & Design in undergraduate programs while parallel to her visual arts practice, she holds the position of the Creative Director of Apolyto Creative Spot, a contemporary art workshop. She lives and works in Athens.

Vassilis Skylakos (1930-2000) was a multi-dimensional artist, one of the most charismatic of the postwar generation. Besides a painter and sculptor, he was an interior decorator, jewellery designer and antique dealer. His work was identified by the art of assemblage, and was associated with various tendencies and movements, such as accretion, anti-art, environmental art, Junk sculpture, Mobile, neo-Dadaism / neo-Dada, Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art.
Skylakos’ work is mostly based on emotion rather than on intellect. The habit of collecting useless and cheap and worthless materials found on the street market, indicates an unusual and special attraction to the material as a physical substance in general. In the case of Skylakos, this attraction was interconnected with the transformation and revitalization of wasted materials: “My work always started from this marginal point that something had been definitively useless and had lost every reason of existence and was totally out of order. I am interested in giving life to what is no longer needed and to make visible was does not exist”, stated himself.

What primarily interests Anastasis Ioannou is the creation of a psychological space and the way this space is reflected on the canvas. That’s why he emphasizes that his images are purely metaphysical. If trees are like faces, then Ioannou’s paintings are portraits of the unknown. They are tree-faces he has seen on the street and in the works of other painters, faintly recalling their shapes. He is not interested in the symbolism of trees or their private lives, but rather in the deeper relationship that humans develop with them (consider that there exist wishing-trees and trees where people choose to hang themselves). “The expression of the inner psychological space is achieved through images of an external place that indeed resemble trees, but for me, that’s the least important thing. I pay more attention to the way light works and diffuses through the image, its intrinsic nature and its fluctuations. I opt to make this light refer not to reality but to the dream itself,” the artist points out. In Anastasis Ioannou’s landscapes, trees are not exactly trees. They could be refugees, portraits of refugees (“Forced to leave again, become a refugee for the second time, and once again an uprooted tree, probably unable to grow new roots, condemned to yearn and suffer,” as Etel Adnan writes). Or they could be self-portraits. One thing is certain: his trees are diverse. Some of them are dark and heavy, others are brighter and more colourful. Some have more impasto, while others have less. They come in different sizes, diptychs and triptychs, and they undergo a transformation, becoming fire or flirting with dusk, fog, and moonlight. But even in the darkest of these paintings, there exist moments of tranquillity. One can watch the weather within these images. And there are trees that seem to embrace each other, exchanging roles, becoming lovers.

Giorgos Tsakiris was born in Giannitsa in 1955. He studied Electronics and later on during his studies in the school of Fine Arts in Florence, he was taught how to paint by professor Faruli and engraving with professor Vizzano. Upon his return to Greece (1983) he was living between Athens and Thessaloniki, holding a workshop on the base of Paikos mountain. In his resume, one can find more than sixteen individual exhibitions in Greece and Italy, while his entries in group exhibitions all over Greece and abroad, are well over twenty-five. Amongst others, he took part in the European Polidaedalus (1993) in Chania, in XIX Biennale in Alexandria (1997), in Athens by Art (2004) and more. His works were exhibited more often in Thessaloniki, while the artist has received many awards: he received the Special Painting Award Santa Croce in Florence in 1987 and 1982, as well as the First Award in Engraving in Vilamania in 1981. His works can also be found in the Vorre Museum, as well as in public and private collections all over Greece, Italy, Germany, France and America. His painting and engraving works until 1980 are influenced heavily by Francis Bacon. While numbers and mathematical signs, elements of Greek and Latin scripture, forming words and sentences, are embodied in his work. Gradually, all surfaces lose their rectangular or square shape. The wall installations are combined with real objects (like tree trunks, ropes and other) forming structural units. Those years around 1980, signify Tsakiris's final transition to three-dimensional structures. Most of them have a totemic shape, and their placement creates a feeling of being part of ritual. The same rationale was followed by a series of his works, which were presented during the late '80s and early '90s. His set up in mountain Paikos in 1986 was very critical in the artist's development. Since then, a series of outdoor space manipulation emerged, which was in complete harmony with the environment, without disrupting its morphology and function. What the artist proposed via this series of interventions was the existence of a special relationship between art and nature, as well as a way for the audience to view this work as a living being rather than a lifeless spectacle. Left there, time altered these structures, the same way it does to every living being. In the '90s, living organisms were presented in front of an audience, in artificial ecosystems, created by Tsakiris in his exhibitions. This time, art doesn't take place outdoors. All the natural functions are installed in the exhibition hall. Giorgos Tsakiris, is a very distinct case in Neo Hellenic Art. With his work, he has managed to go completely independent from static art, which derives from an organic process that allows his works to have their own life, intricately interwoven with time. His work is directly connected with Nature and Ecology. Using organic matter, he synthesizes visual propositions, which are the result of an obsessive observation of physical phenomena and nature. This way, he draws our gaze to phenomena and concepts that our society would otherwise take for granted, or ignore and disregard. Giorgos Tsakiris is an artist who honours his generation. With his work and stance, he is keeping his distance from the social and moral degradation, which our modern society has imposed, in a society of overproduction. This makes him a rather important artist.

Danil studied under Konstantinos Parthenis and obtained a scholarship from the Greek government to study in Paris. There, he completed most of his works, heavily inspired by the revolutionary atmosphere of May ’68. He was a friend and a collaborator to art critic Pierre Restany, who introduced the artistic movement of Nouveau Réalisme - the thoughtful European response to the cheerful frivolity of American Pop Art. Witty, introverted and dedicated to his uncompromising quest, Danil left behind a collection of works that became a landmark of his era. The importance of his art surpasses the geographical limits of Greece and can be compared to some of the emblematic moments of the postwar European avant-garde. For Danil, great art is born when aesthetic need becomes a societal need. Indicative of Danil’s artistic greatness is the fact that he, as well as his loyal companion Vlassis Caniaris, lived and worked parallel to many influential and powerful artistic currents (Arte Mécano, Arte Povera, Art Informel, Minimalisme, and the Supports/Surfaces collective), yet never completely adhering to any of them, firmly insistent on artistic independence. From early on, Danil broke away from the constraints posed by narrative representation and claimed the three-dimensional space through a series of works that defied all representational conventions. Using cheap materials like cardboard boxes, rags, wood and, later, burlap fabric, the artist managed to create a world which, through its handmade clarity, resisted the dominant structures of overconsumption, overproduction, and mass industrialization. A rationalist and strict materialist, Danil was suspicious of any kind of metaphysical ‘escape’. Nevertheless, he managed, through his later works, to touch on the limits of artificial and natural light (?), creations that, without transcendental references, still feel sacred and foreboding. Contrary to everyone else, Danil, from his earliest all the way to his latest works, from his temperas as an apprentice to his evocatively abstract compositions of the ‘80s, deals with light not through the realm of visual arts, but through ontology. Ex nihilo, he creates light as a material and simultaneously a highly spiritual conquest. The artist uses light as a spatial premise, producing it as if he were an engineer, excavating it as if he were an archaeologist, and birthing it through the shadows. He does so in a way that overcomes the limitations of the material wall on which the works rely, rendering the wall not as the end of the artwork’s world, but as the beginning of a different world entirely. He belongs to those special artists - like Marcel Duchamp - who relied on the participation of the informed viewer for the artwork to achieve its full potential of completeness, not in the spectator’s eyes, but in the spectator’s mind. Danil was a pioneer of light, but not in the way that the Impressionists or the Fauvists, who he greatly admired, were. Neither was he a light pioneer in the illusionistic, Renaissance aesthetic sense, but in a transcendental manner that connected Byzantine mysticism to Kazimir Malevich. Danil possessed a controlled method - a la Cézanne - which results in almost irrational conclusions of a visual apocalypsis (révélation) about the light that creates space or, rather, the light that allows space to exist.

Dimitris Alithinos is one of the artists who continue, from the 1970s to this day, to shape the dialogue of their work with the history of contemporary Greek art. A ceaselessly productive pioneer, he is steadily focused on the social concerns of our time and on researching the visual language and the questions that arise on a global level. In 1981, alongside his purely visual work, Dimitris Alithinos started his Concealments, an ongoing international project-offering to the future which warns about environmental destruction and human extinction. To this day there are 214 Concealments hidden around the planet, from the North to the South Pole and from East to West. A little later, in 1985, in reaction to the invasion of globalisation, he created the series of Standing Up for the Cultures of the World and Offerings, giving priority to the preservation of cultural polyphony. He has had many solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, and has represented our country in various biennials among which the Venice Biennale in 1997. In 2013 the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) hosted a major retrospective of his works, and he was awarded by the Association of Greek Art Critics, AICA Hellas, for the contribution of his oeuvre to the history of contemporary Greek art.

Born in Krania, Grevena in 1964, he studied at the Zossimea Teachers’ Academy of Ioannina (1982-1984) and then at the Thessaloniki School of Fine Arts (1984-1989) under Vangelis Dimitreas. In his early works the drawing and the composition dominate, with colour in a complementary role. The human figure is mostly absent while there are clear references to land (fields, terrain landscape) and the vague horizon of the sea. His influences come from the plains of Thessaly and the landscapes of Mount Athos. In his compositions he introduces upright landscapes unlike the traditional, horizontally orientated layout. In the 2000s he starts to propose wall-mounted constructions and installations with aluminium, neon light, fluorescent lamps and Plexiglas, with the added writing reinforcing the image as well as alluding to an archetypal form of communication. Yet he continues to practise painting, using it —like the written word— to convey emotions, charge his viewers and bring them into a game where life converses with death and art with technology. His most recent series — Migrations (2012), . In my country (2014) and Geographies (2017)— comprise installations, photographic material and painting and examine the journey of refugees while making clear references to Greece in her time of crisis. He has had over 20 solo exhibitions in Greece and Cyprus and has participated in dozens of group exhibitions in Greece and abroad (Britain, France, Spain, China, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria, etc.). he has designed stage sets and costumes for the theatre, and teaches in secondary education and the paining workshops of the Municipality of Trikala. His works can be found in the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Larissa Centre for Contemporary Art, the Gallery of Komotini, the Tsitsanis Museum in Trikala, in public spaces as well as in several private collections.