The first major UK showing of the Greek Pop artist, marking his centenary with work made under the dictatorship, where flat colour and comic-strip line carry the politics.
The Hellenic Centre in Marylebone gives the Greek Pop artist Giorgos Ioannou his first substantial show in Britain, from Thursday 8 October to Thursday 19 November 2026.
Ioannou was born in 1926, and this year is his centenary. He took up the vocabulary of Pop Art as it arrived from London and New York: flat colour, the comic-strip line, the borrowed and repeated image.
He turned it on the Greece of the colonels. Pop elsewhere was about supermarkets and film stars. In Athens between 1967 and 1974, the same bright surfaces were the only way to say certain things at all, and the cheerfulness was the disguise.
The works here come from those years, and the show reads them for their politics as well as their style. Ioannou worked for decades after the junta fell in 1974, but this selection returns to the dictatorship.
The show opens in Frieze week, with a private view on Tuesday 13 October. A London room for a Greek painter of his generation is rare, and this one opens while the international art trade is in town.