Malvina Panagiotidi
The Allure of the Bizarre – Space in Between | A Survey of Greek Art
January 22, 2025–September 22, 2025National Gallery, Athens
The impact of Goya’s subversive view of the world proves remarkably resilient. It reverberates through the liberating explosion of surrealist visions and the poetic language of modernism, and continues to offer a treasure trove of visual interpretations of our relationship with the world and the beings within it. Goya’s prints are marked by the lifelike portrayal of the monstrous, the compelling absurdity of the bizarre, and the paradoxical attraction of the repulsive. Drawing on the theatricality of carnival traditions and Commedia dell’ Arte, the artist creates a novel universe defined by ambiguity and hybridity, a constant tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. This effect arises from his masterful fusion of everyday, readily recognisable themes with incongruous, threatening, repellent, or even incomprehensible figures that, paradoxically, draw us in rather than push us away – an attraction stemming perhaps from our intuitive recognition of something deeply familiar within these unsettling images.
Inspired by Goya’s prints in the National Gallery and aligned with our commitment to reinterpreting historical collections through the Space in Between programme, we present, parallel to the exhibition of the 80 prints in Goya’s Los Caprichos series, the survey The Allure of the Bizarre, featuring works by ten Greek artists who, through their unique viewpoints, embrace and depict the bizarre, the hybrid, and the grotesque. Through their engagement with the incongruous, the alien, and the repulsive, these artists challenge traditional boundaries of the human and dismantle rigid distinctions between the natural and the artificial. Their work destabilises conventional classifications that neatly separate genres and explores the relationship between the beautiful and the deformed, the anthropomorphic and the zoomorphic, nature and technological civilisation. The artists interpret psychological states and social processes of exclusion and marginalisation, while offering, whether with humour or caustic irony, and sometimes with deep existential anxiety, a subversive critique of the stereotypes that shape our worldview.
Featuring artworks across a range of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, animation, and performance, The Allure of the Bizarre is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue (in Greek and English).
Featured artists: Angelos Antonopoulos, Celia Daskopoulou, Yannis Gaitis, Marianna Ignataki, Christophoros Katsadiotis, Dionysis Kavalieratos, Tassos Mantzavinos, Malvina Panagiotidi, Angelos Papadimitriou, Filippos Tsitsopoulos
Curated by Syrago Tsiara
