A landmark survey of Cypriot modernist George Pol. Georghiou at the Hellenic Centre, with major 1940s and 1950s works including pieces recovered from Famagusta.
The most extensive selection of George Pol. Georghiou’s work ever shown outside Cyprus hung at The Hellenic Centre in Marylebone from Wednesday 3 June to Monday 22 June 2026. The A. G. Leventis Gallery brought it to London.
Georghiou was born in Famagusta in 1901 and trained as a solicitor in London. He gave up law for painting in 1938 and taught himself from the old masters, chiefly El Greco, and from ancient, Byzantine, Gothic and folk art. His subjects were the people, landscapes and historical moments of Cyprus.
By the 1950s he was the first Cypriot artist to exhibit beyond the island, with solo shows in cities including London, Paris and Athens. He died in 1972, and a retrospective by the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture in 1999 confirmed him as a central figure of Cypriot modern art.
The London showing, which marked Cyprus’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, followed a debut in Nicosia. It gathered major paintings from the 1940s and 1950s, some only recently returned from Famagusta through the bicommunal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage.
Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel and Katerina Stephanides curated the exhibition and led tours on the stories behind individual canvases.