Stanley Whitney @ Gagosian, Athens - 'Return to the Garden' Exhibition

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden

Gagosian, Athens

October 2, 2025 – January 17, 2026

Stanley Whitney

The Courage of the Poet, 2025

Oil on linen

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

Gagosian presents Return to the Garden, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Stanley Whitney in Athens. This is Whitney’s first exhibition in Greece since his participation in Documenta 14 in 2017.

The exhibition’s title, Return to the Garden, evokes themes of arcadian innocence and harmony with nature. Unencumbered by preconceived subjects or narrative elements, these vibrant abstractions offer viewers the opportunity to engage with a heightened awareness of color and perception.

Stanley Whitney asserts the power of color through loose grids of roughly rectangular shapes, creating compositions of three or four rows separated by horizontal bands that traverse the canvas. Characterized by active brushwork, layered pigment, and jostling borders, each field is defined in relation to its neighbors and to each painting as a whole. In some works, he repeats variations of the same hues either between multiple blocks or extended across their lateral bands, establishing myriad formal connections and contrasts. 

Stanley Whitney

On the Street Where You Live, 2024

Oil on linen

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

By sustaining this format, Stanley Whitney has developed a compositional framework from which to produce individual canvases full of unexpected, energetic harmonies between vivid colors and fluid gestures. Influenced by traditions including Abstract Expressionism and quiltmaking, his paintings additionally parallel the polyphonies and syncopation of jazz, forming compelling expressions of creativity and freedom.

Stanley Whitney also admires ancient Greek vase painting, particularly of the preclassical Geometric and Archaic eras (c. 900–500 BCE). Painted by hand and divided into banded registers, the abstract linear patterns of these early vases underly the compositions of later, more figurative styles. In looking to such ancient sources when developing his stacked compositions, Stanley Whitney draws upon an interest in archaic forms that similarly motivated both the Abstract Expressionists and earlier modernists.

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney

Roma 55, 2023

Oil on linen

24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

In another connection with Mediterranean antiquity, the title of the Roma series (2017–) speaks to the inspiration Stanley Whitney found in Rome, where he lived and worked for five years in the 1990s. It was then that he consolidated the approach to abstraction that he continues to explore, a method sparked in part by the ancient architecture and murals that he encountered there and in Egypt. Unlike the straight lines of modern construction, the weathered, hand-built structures of the ancient world possess irregular contours and surfaces that correspond with the gestural demarcations of Whitney’s paintings.

Other works featured in Return to the Garden include new paintings from the ongoing Stay Song series (2017–), which Stanley Whitney debuted in Athens for Documenta 14, as well as the Monk & Munch paintings (2020–). In these rectangular canvases, he pays homage to jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and expressionist painter Edvard Munch, highlighting essential relationships between art and music.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens 11521

gagosian.com

Related Posts:

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The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, February 8 – May 6, 2018

Stanley Whitney: Drawings

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Stanley Whitney: Paintings

Lisson Gallery, Milan, 2 October – 13 November 2015

Charline von Heyl @ The George Economou Collection, Marousi / Athens - "The Giddy Road to Ruin" Exhibition

Charline von Heyl 

The Giddy Road to Ruin

The George Economou Collection, Marousi / Athens

14 June 2025 – March 2026

Charline von Heyl 

The Giddy Road to Ruin, 2015

Acrylic on canvas, 62 x 54 inches (157.5 x 137 cm)

© Charline von Heyl

Courtesy of Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Petzel New York

Photo: Butcher Walsh

The George Economou Collection presents The Giddy Road to Ruin, the first survey exhibition by German-American artist CHARLINE VON HEYL (b. 1960) in Greece. 

Across three floors of gallery space, The Giddy Road to Ruin features select works from the last several decades. The earliest is an outstanding painting from the George Economou Collection—an emblematic example of the artist’s practice—Untitled (11/93, I) (1993), while the most recent is her first-ever photographic work, Athens, made in 2024.

The title of the exhibition, The Giddy Road to Ruin, derives from her 2015 painting of the same name and may be interpreted as a reflection of her thinking as well as the nature of painting itself. Displayed at the exhibition’s beginning and considered within the context of Greece’s ancient and modern landscape, the painting takes on greater significance, especially in relation to its presentation alongside the Athens (2024) collages. In these graphic images we experience the echoes and rumblings of both the present and history.

Charline von Heyl is one of the most significant painters of her generation. Educated in Germany in the 1980s and inspired by both senior artists and contemporaries—including Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel, and Michael Krebber, as well as Albert Oehlen, Jutta Koether, and Cosima von Bonin—her work began to carve out new territory, particularly after her move to New York in 1996. While her paintings share the rigor and intensity of theirs, Charline von Heyl’s work eschews irony in favor of a more openly amused humor and a certain nimbleness in the synthesis of mind and hand.

Once in the United States, Charline von Heyl developed a novel, constructive, and strategic approach to creating and solving artistic problems that allows each painting to be “a self-generating machine that finds its own soul.” Her work is neither wholly abstract nor representational but simultaneously both. Her art succeeds by embracing visual and conceptual contradictions, keeping viewers intrigued by the seemingly impossible combinations of subjects, compositions, and styles that result in deeply satisfying yet puzzling works. In many of her paintings, forms appear both in stasis and in flux simultaneously, as evident in works such as Demons Dance Alone (2022) or World Rabbit Clock (2022). Shapes seem to be concurrently at the fore and in the background, as seen in her depiction of bowling pins—a recurring image in her vocabulary, particularly well-represented in two paintings from 2015 on mid-twentieth-century barkcloth fabric that are located on the second floor of the exhibition. To the indiscriminate eye, the contradictory styles in von Heyl’s paintings might seem irreconcilable, yet they all coexist within the singularly coherent universe of her art.

While a series of four densely composed paintings on barkcloth are a through line from the first floor, the appearance of two stolid and iconic works on the second floor signal a change of mood in the exhibition. The heraldic devices in Untitled (11/93, I) (1993) carry ominous, even militaristic overtones, in contrast to the insouciant black-and-white cut-out shapes of Time Waiting (2010), which harken back to mid-century travel advertisements’ filtered interpretation of Cubism. These works stand in stark contrast to the owl paintings from 2020–2021, in which the generally solitary birds—symbols of good fortune and wisdom—gather, against type, into a multitude. This capacious theme, with its potential for great and even adorable variation, offered a lighthearted interlude for Charline von Heyl to paint and for the viewer to enjoy encountering the third floor of the exhibition.

Here the opening salvo is a boldly blue bird in the large, rectangular painting Animal Delinquency (2021). Ultramarine fowl are partially obscured by two smudged-out, variegated forms of two other creatures—owls, perhaps? The collapse of subjects and the spaces they inhabit creates an apprehensive experience. The scroll-like structure of Banish Air from Air (2017) also features bird-like forms flying through interlocking patterns of words, lines, and shapes. At its center is a variation of her repeated, defiant yet playful female power figure, also seen in The Giddy Road to Ruin.

The painting Ninfa (2021) continues the subtle theme of feminine power in her work. Pulchritude is rendered as outlandish, with blue lips and a graceful line suggesting a chin overtaken by a coalescence of black and ochre biomorphic forms resembling birds. The head itself transforms into a dense field of patterns, becoming increasingly abstract. The fifteen diverse, rigorous while and whimsical black-and-white drawings that comprise Drawings Group 2 (2006) elaborate on and connect to the inscriptive elements—sometimes appearing as ideograms or Rorschach-like forms— not unlike Banish Air from Air. They also echo the structure and palette of Athens earlier in the exhibition. Each work on view is replete with such recursive connections, dissonances, and discontinuities—eye-opening and mind-boggling revelations await.

Charline von Heyl: The Giddy Road to Ruin is co-curated by Adam D. Weinberg and Skarlet Smatana, the director of The George Economou Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. A publication with essays by Adam D. Weinberg and artist Helen Marten accompanies the exhibition.

THE GEORGE ECONOMOU COLLECTION

80 Kifissias Ave, 15125 Marousi, Athens

www.thegeorgeeconomoucollection.com

Modern Love @ National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens - ΕΜΣΤ - EMEST - or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies

Modern Love

or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies

ΕΜΣΤ - EMEST - National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens

Through 5 November 2023

Marge Monko

I Don't Know You So I Can't Love You, 2018 (detail)

Courtesy of the artist

Marge Monko

I Don’t Know You, So I Can’t Love You, 2018 (detail)

Installation, smart assistants, speakers, pigment prints

Courtesy of the artist

Installation view: Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, DE

Photo: Bernhard Strauss

Marge Monko

I Don't Know You So I Can't Love You, 2018 (detail)

Courtesy of the artist 

ΕΜΣΤ | EMEST | National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens presents Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies), a major group exhibition curated by artistic director Katerina Gregos.

The subtitle of the exhibition is a reference to Eva Illouz’s book, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, which argues that these relationships have become increasingly defined by economic and political models of bargaining, exchange, and equity. Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) explores the state of love and human bonds in the age of the Internet, social media, and high capitalism, probing how the digital sphere, the impact of technology giants, and neo-liberal practices have transformed love, social relations, and the way we interact with one another.

Gabriel Abrantes

Artificial Humors, 2016 (video still)

Single channel video, colour, sound, 29’

Produced by Herma Films, with the financial support of 

Fundação de Serralves (PT), Bienal de São Paulo (BR), 

Colección Inelcom (SP), ICA - Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual (PT)

Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon

Gabriel Abrantes & Benjamin Crotty

Liberdade, 2011 (video still)

Single-channel video, colour, sound, 17΄

Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions, 

with the financial support of Toyota de Angola

Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon

Candice Breitz

TLDR, 2017 (video still)

13-Channel Video Installation 

Commissioned by the B3 Biennial of  

the Moving Image, Frankfurt am Main

Courtesy of the artist

Candice Breitz

TLDR, 2017 (video still)

13-Channel Video Installation 

Commissioned by the B3 Biennial of  

the Moving Image, Frankfurt am Main

Courtesy of the artist

Melanie Bonajo

Night Soil - Economy of Love, 2015 (video still)

Single channel video projection, colour, sound, 32’ 46’’

Courtesy the artist and AKINCI, Amsterdam

Melanie Bonajo

Night Soil - Economy of Love, 2015 (video still)

Single channel video projection, colour, sound, 32’ 46’’

Courtesy the artist and AKINCI, Amsterdam

The accessibility of the Internet to an ever-greater number of people has had liberating effects, encouraging and empowering more open and diverse lifestyles, contributing to the dissolution of interpersonal orthodox conventions and social constrictions, and crumbling taboos and biases around gender and sexuality.

Laura Cemin

In Between. The warmth. 2017/2020 (detail)

Inkjet prints on Fine Art paper, variable materials

Courtesy of the artist

Marijke De Roover

if you need me i’ll be pretending things will be different this time, 2019 

From the series Niche Content for Frustrated Queers

Meme, variable dimensions

Courtesy of the artist and Arcade, London

Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) looks at how the Internet has facilitated the expression of non-heteronormative sexual identities, especially in societies where queerness or non-binary sexuality are considered taboo, or even forbidden. It also explores the human pathologies associated with the commodification of emotion and the effects of digital dependency on relationships, as well as the issues that arise when the boundaries between the public and private, as well the virtual and the real, become more and more fluid. The Covid-19 pandemic and physical distancing have added yet another challenge to achieving fulfilling, intimate and meaningful human interaction.

Sanam Khatibi

Deadly Nightshade, 2020

Oil on canvas, 120 x 230 cm

From the collection of the Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Mahmoud Khaled

Do You Have Work Tomorrow?, 2013 (detail)

Series of 32 screen shots of a staged conversation on an iPhone, 

transformed into black and white photographs 

developed in a dark room, framed, 18 x 13 cm (each)

Courtesy of the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Duran Lantink

Old Stock Collection: Look 3 (Purple Vagina Face), 2019

Mixed media with silk, satin, tulle

From the collection of the Centraal Museum, Utrecht

At the same time, we also live in a time that philosopher Byung-Chul Han has labelled “emotional capitalism”, where human emotions have been co-opted by market forces. Thus, apart from offering an open and potentially endless sense of possibility, the dating supermarkets of Tinder and Grindr, “speed dating”, and the ease of Internet exchange have also hollowed out relationships and led to selfish or narcissistic forms of behaviour and the creation and curation of misleading images of the self, making it ever more difficult to establish what is real, meaningful, or true.

Ariane Loze

Our Cold Loves, 2022 (video still)

Single channel video projection, colour, sound, 32’ 31’’  

Courtesy of the artist and Michel Rein Paris | Brussels 

Ariane Loze

Our Cold Loves, 2022 (video still)

Single channel video projection, colour, sound, 32’ 31’’  

Courtesy of the artist and Michel Rein Paris | Brussels 

Maria Mavropoulou

The Lovers, from the Family Portraits series, 2018

Light box, 100 x 100 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald

pplkpr, 2015

Software, single channel video, colour, sound, 1’ 48’’

Courtesy of the artists

Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) is as much about individuals as it is about the systems of control that bind us together. Equally, it is about new societal patterns, investigating the challenges and possibilities that the Internet and social media present. It recognises love as a potent emotional force and intense psychological bond between people that gives meaning to our lives in ways that no other interaction, object, or experience can.

Eva Papamargariti

Soft Touch, 2015/2022 (video still)

HD video, Color, Sound, 5΄ 

Courtesy of the artist

Yorgos Prinos

Man Staring, London, 2022

Pigment print, 44 x 33 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Hot Wheels, Athens

At a time of increasing alienation, individualism, and loneliness – symptoms of our world’s increasingly urbanised lifestyles – how can we reclaim meaningful intimate relationships? How can love be rescued from the claws of capitalism and the corporate technosphere? How can one resist the instrumentalisation of love, its superficialisation and banalisation by commerce and social media? Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) looks into the pathologies and problems afflicting love and matters of the heart and attempts to imagine a way out of our current alienation, emotional sterility, and loneliness.

Peter Puklus

With dog and kids in the park (Balance), Budapest, 2019 

From the series The Hero Mother – How to build a house, 2016-2019

Courtesy of the artist and Glassyard Gallery, Budapest

Margaret Salmon

I You Me We Us, 2018

16mm film on two monitors, 16΄

Courtesy of the artist

Hannah Toticki

Focus Wear, 2020 (installation view)

Various textiles, steel (180 x 50 x 45 cm and 170 x 55 x 45 cm)

Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou

The product of ongoing research, the exhibition – which features 24 artists from 14 countries – comes to Greece after presentations at the Museum für Neue Kunst (Germany), Tallinna Kunstihoone (Estonia), IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] and Centraal Museum (Netherlands). For the exhibition at EMΣT - EMEST Athens, Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) has been expanded to additionally include Greek as well as international artists, most of whom are presenting their work for the first time in Greece.

Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) is accompanied by a bilingual (English-Greek) publication designed by Rafaela Drazic and edited by Katerina Gregos and Theophilos Tramboulis.

ARTISTS

Gabriel Abrantes (1984, US/PT)

Andreas Angelidakis (1968, GR)

Melanie Bonajo (1978, NI)

Candice Breitz (1978, ZA)

Laura Cemin (1992, IT)

Benjamin Crotty (1979, US)

Kyriaki Goni (GR, 1982)

David Haines (1969, UK)

Juliet Jacques (1981, UK)

Sanam Khatibi (1979, IR/BE)

Mahmoud Khaled (1982, EG)

Duran Lantink (1988, Nl)

Ariane Loze (1988, BE)

Maria Mavropoulou (1989, GR)

Lauren Lee Mccarthy (US)

Kyle Mcdonald (US)

Marge Monko (1976, EE)

Eva Papamargariti (1987, GR)

Peter Puklus (1980, RO/HU)

Yorgos Prinos (1977, GR)

Marijke De Roover (1990, BE)

Margaret Salmon (1975, US/UK)

Hannah Toticki (1984, DK)

István Zsíros (1985, HU)

ΕΜΣΤ | EMEST - National Museum of Contemporary Art

Kallirrois Ave. & Amvr. Frantzi Str. (Former Fix Factory), Athens, 11743

www.emst.gr

Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) | EMΣT Athens -  15.12.2022 - 05.11.2023

Sculptor Costas Coulentianos Retrospective Exhibition, MMCA, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece

COULENTIANOS THE LAST OF THE MODERN ACROBATS
Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece
Through July 26, 2013

The Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, presents the great retrospective exhibition dedicated to COSTAS COULENTIANOS, which aims to present the entire work by the significant Greek sculptor. The exhibition is organized by the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the Benaki Museum, in collaboration with the son of the artist, Ben Coulentianos and Theodoros Papapadopoulos. The exhibition was first presented in Athens at the Benaki Museum (28 September 2012 -5 January 2013) and had been a great success.

Sculptor Costas Coulentianos was born in Athens in 1918. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and, later, in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where he studied under Ossip Zadkine. Costas Coulentianos met Henri Laurens, which had a definitive influence on a great many of his works. His first solo exhibition was held in Paris, in 1962, at a same time, he had started to discuss with architects, how sculpture could be included in architecture, both in public and in private spaces.

The exhibition showcases 80 pieces by the artist, which represent the entire gamut of his creative periods. These range from his first student pieces in the 1940s, when Costas Coulentianos still worked with clay, to the monumental pieces in iron from the last decades of his life. The exhibition seeks to renegotiate the artist's body of work as well as its historical role in the context of artistic production in Greece and internationally, his presence in Paris being catalyzing for contemporary sculpture. 

Issues including the variety of materials he utilised and the sculptural ease with which he handled them; his engagement with the human form; how he combined levels in both small and larger pieces; how cohesive his progress was to an ever more complete simplicity, all constitute fundamental issues both of the exhibition and the accompanying publication. 

Discussing his own oeuvre COSTAS COULENTIANOS stated:

The main material I utilise is iron, ever harder, heavier, more difficult to work with. At the same time I try to remove some of its crude weight and give it motion. My basic problem is space, light and volume. How can each piece be positioned in space and accept the light, so that it can gain significance? I attempt to open space through my forms, creating holes that will allow the light through, so that the space can enter the artefact, which shall, in its turn take its place within the space.

The art historian and curator of the exhibition DENYS ZACHAROPOULOS, artistic director of MMCA, analyzing the artist's work underlines:

From bronze to iron, welding to brazed iron, cement to aluminium, synthetic materials to wood, from wool and weaving to concrete reinforcing bars, stainless steel to bolted metal constructions, Coulentianos experimented, always reaching a stage where the development of "the other" is neither a mechanical repetition nor a mannerism of variation. The artist's work of all the different periods may be said to anticipate the future, not so that it may be original, but, on the contrary, in order to avoid the perennial need for a new patent in the development of sculpture. Every time that he engaged with a new medium he did so, not to rehabilitate an ailing sculpture, but, rather, in order to revive the desire and give life to a sculpture that keeps asking for more, that tries to stand on its own feet, to evolve, to grow, to embrace space, the other, man, the horizon, the world. A man facing a man, a man approaching a man, a man that knows how to stop before oppressing or violating the other, the human in Coulentianos's sculpture is inscribed in a profoundly political dialectic. Even as the artist's sculpture incomparably captures the sensuality that inspires the erotic nature of all human relationships, it also hails from a deep poetic awareness of a man who has experienced fascism and war, the most atrocious state of man when he abuses authority and tries to subject the other. In this respect, Coulentianos's work clearly demonstrates, alongside the sensual surrender to love, the power of resistance, which serves as a constant reminder of the precarious presence of the other, of alterity. Coulentianos is therefore not only the last of the modern acrobats, but, moreover, a fervent advocate of humanism, in the full platonic sense of the word, which fuses love for the other and rejection of war into a single unique awareness and a political stance, not of representation, but of presence, and into a discourse, not of "either-or", but of "you 'll find me in your way"; yet, that is not a threat, but almost a confession of love, a bold statement and demonstration of presence in life, of an active participation in the flux of life and the cosmos. This is the Coulentianos who installs sculptures in cooperation with architects in regional France, who deploys forms in the landscape that embrace the horizon and converse with the trees, who escapes upwards, towards the sky, envious of the flight of birds, who affectionately leans towards all human forms, with a bold, meaningful gesture of a man who offers his body and soul to the person before him.

Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art
Egnatia 154 (on the grounds of Thessaloniki International Fair)
546 36 THESSALONIKI, GREECE
Museum's website: www.mmca.org