Markos Kampanis brought his painterly voyage through Homer’s Odyssey, worked over a facsimile of a fifteenth-century British Library manuscript, to the Greek Ambassador’s residence in Mayfair.
Athens-born painter Markos Kampanis showed his series on Homer’s Odyssey at The Hellenic Residence in Mayfair from Friday 26 June to Friday 3 July 2026. The Embassy of Greece presented the exhibition.
Born in 1955, Kampanis trained as a painter in London, where he lived until 1980. He has worked since across painting, printmaking and book illustration. A retrospective toured the National Library of Greece and the Teloglion Foundation of Arts in Thessaloniki in 2023 and 2024.
He began the series in 2018, a painterly voyage along a parallel, imagined geography. Its centrepiece is a four-volume artist’s book in charcoal and ink over a facsimile of the Harley MS 6325 Odyssey manuscript held by the British Library.
The series had its first showing in 2025 at the Ghika Gallery of the Benaki Museum in Athens, beside work by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika.
The London run opened days before the world premiere of Christopher Nolan’s screen adaptation of the same poem. Ambassador Yiannis Tsaousis opened it by calling the Odyssey a cornerstone of world civilisation, and Kampanis was present throughout.