The first major UK showing of the Greek Pop artist, marking his centenary — work made under the dictatorship, where flat colour and comic-strip line carry the politics.
Giorgos Ioannou was born in 1926 and would have been a hundred this year. He took the vocabulary of Pop Art — the flat colour, the comic-strip line, the borrowed and repeated image — at the moment it was arriving from London and New York, and turned it on the Greece of the colonels. That is the whole difference. 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 is the disguise.
The works gathered here come from the late 1960s and the 1970s, the years of the dictatorship, and the show reads them for the politics that surfaced across that decade rather than treating them as style. He worked on for decades after the junta fell, but it is the dictatorship years that the centenary has brought back into focus, and reasonably so.
The Hellenic Centre marks the centenary with the first substantial presentation of his work in Britain, opening in Frieze week with a private view on Tuesday 13 October and late hours on Thursdays through the run. A Greek painter of that generation getting a London room at all is rare; getting one in the week the entire international art trade is in town is either very good timing or a deliberate provocation.