The Hellenic Centre’s October programme pairs two morning conversations on its autumn exhibitions with a lecture on the first Greek women painters and a talk by Christos Dikeakos.
The Hellenic Centre on Paddington Street is the Marylebone home of Greek culture in London, founded after several earlier attempts to establish one had failed. The Hellenic Community Trust bought the building in 1992 and registered as a charity two years later, and the house has promoted Hellenic culture in Britain from it ever since.
October opens its autumn. Two exhibitions run through the month, Giorgos Ioannou’s A Different Kind of Pop and the Fernweh collection. Two of these four occasions are morning conversations built around them, each beginning with a breakfast reception.
The other two stand on their own. The art historian Gelly Gryntaki opens a lecture series on three millennia of Greek women’s painting. Christos Dikeakos, who has photographed Athens and Vancouver across five decades as cities of layered history, discusses the work with the curator Emily Butler. All four require booking.
In Conversation: Andrew Wilson with Dimitris Ioannou and Kostas Stasinopoulos
A breakfast reception at half past nine, then a conversation on the practice of Giorgos Ioannou, led by the critic and curator Andrew Wilson.
Wilson is joined by Kostas Stasinopoulos, Director of Exhibitions and Programmes at KYKLOS, and by the artist’s son Dimitris Ioannou. It accompanies the Centre’s exhibition A Different Kind of Pop, which runs 8 October to 19 November.
In Conversation: Irene Y. Panagopoulos, Katerina Hadji and Dr Nayia Yiakoumaki
A morning on collecting as a way of ordering the world: which stories are kept, shown and passed on.
Irene Y. Panagopoulos, who founded the collection the show is drawn from, sits with its curator Katerina Hadji and with Dr Nayia Yiakoumaki, Director of the Hellenic Centre. The exhibition behind it is Revisiting: Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands, and the German word in its title, a longing for distant places, is the conversation’s real subject.
Spinning Myths, Painting Shadows: Women and the Origins of Greek Art
The opening lecture of The Origin of Painting, a series tracing Greek women’s work in the visual arts across nearly three millennia.
Pliny puts the origin of painting in the hand of a Greek woman: Kora of Sicyon, tracing her lover’s shadow on a wall to keep his likeness before he left. The art historian Gelly Gryntaki starts there, with the earliest female weavers and the named women painters of antiquity, Timarete and Anaxandra, and the founding myth Western art has retold ever since while overlooking the women who followed her. It is at seven, with a nominal five-pound entry.
Artist Talk: Christos Dikeakos
Five decades of Christos Dikeakos’ practice, in conversation with the curator Emily Butler.
The talk turns on Sites and Places: Athens, made between 1986 and 1997, and on its Vancouver counterpart of 1990 to 2015 — two bodies of work that read a city as archaeology, and Greek myth as something still moving through the present rather than fixed behind it. It is at seven, with a nominal five-pound entry.