Seventeen works by 15 international artists from the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection, curated by Katerina Hadji, on Greece as both a place and an idea.
Seventeen works by 15 international artists from the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection go on show at The Hellenic Centre in Marylebone from Thursday 8 October 2026. Katerina Hadji curates the exhibition, which closes on Saturday 7 November.
Fernweh is a German word with no English equivalent: the ache for places you have never been. It is the inverse of nostalgia, a longing for a place you have left, and the two words together are the organising idea of the show. Greece is the subject in both senses, a real country and an imagined one.
People who have never lived there long for it, and so do people who cannot go back. Hadji arranges the works around that double reading, where past and present meet through the act of looking.
The Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection is a private holding rather than a museum, assembled by one person’s judgement over years. Its works are rarely lent as a group, and the collection shows them here in collaboration with The Hellenic Centre.
None of the 15 artists is Greek, and several have never shown in Britain. The exhibition shows a London audience Greece as other people imagine it.