Rather than revisiting abstraction as a closed historical chapter, this exhibition reopens it through the work of women who shaped its language across different geographies. Featuring works by Op Art pioneer and Greek modernist figures alongside artists from the Middle East and beyond, the exhibition foregrounds the intellectual rigor and formal clarity of geometric abstraction while restoring visibility to voices long sidelined in dominant narratives.
The show sets the tone for a program that positions the foundation as a space for reconsidering modernism through a contemporary lens.
Vasilissis Sofias 9, Athens
TouchingART, Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation
Dates: January 7 – February 1, 2026 — closed January 17 and 29.
Rather than treating accessibility as an add-on, this exhibition places it at the center of the curatorial process. Developed within amaka’s TouchingART program and drawing on works from the museum’s permanent collection, the project activates touch, sound, and bodily presence as essential interpretive tools. Tactile works, Greek audio description via QR, soundscapes, Braille, and adapted tours invite visitors to slow down and engage through multiple senses.
Also running until March 2026, the museum is presenting the large-scale exhibition Matisse to Warhol, which brings together landmark works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and other defining figures of twentieth-century art. Drawn largely from the Goulandris Collection, the exhibition maps the shifts from modernism to post-war abstraction and Pop, offering a rare chance to see canonical movements articulated through museum-quality works in a single, coherent narrative.
A visit also opens onto the museum’s permanent collection, one of the strongest presentations of modern and contemporary art in Athens, with works by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, and Constantin Brâncuși displayed across its upper floors.
Eratosthenous 13, Pangrati
Ilias Papailiakis, White Series (The 365 Project), Vorres Museum
Dates: January 10 – March 8, 2026
Eight works built from unrealized fresco studies form a shifting polyptych that resists easy categorization. Presented as part of the Vorres Museum’s ongoing “365 Project,” the White Series moves between painting, drawing, and sculptural perception, treating incompletion as an active condition rather than a deficit. Curated by Olga Daniilopoulou, the works enter the collection with quiet deliberation.
The exhibition unfolds within the broader context of the Vorres Museum’s permanent holdings, which span post-war Greek art, folk traditions, and international modernism. Galleries dedicated to figures such as Yannis Tsarouchis and Takis, along with outdoor sculpture spaces and architectural installations, make the museum a destination in its own right.
Konstantinou 1, Paiania
Changing Grounds – Stories Beyond the Record, National Gallery
Dates: Until September 30, 2026
While renovation work continues across parts of the National Gallery, visitors can already experience this quietly ambitious exhibition by Natassa Biza. Drawing on archival material and overlooked historical narratives, Changing Grounds unfolds as an investigation into how records are formed, distorted, or erased. Presented as part of the Space in Between program, the exhibition occupies the central building and offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the institution’s broader transformation.
At the same time, work is progressing on the museum’s third floor, which is expected to reopen in the first half of the year with a redesigned presentation of the permanent twentieth- and twenty-first-century collection—an important reset for how modern and contemporary Greek art is framed within the national canon.
Vasileos Konstantinou 50, Ilisia
Blind Spot: Sea Routes and Migratory Flows, Athens Municipal Art Center
Dates: January 13 – February 8, 2026
This mixed art exhibition begins from a specific, devastating point: the Adriana shipwreck off Pylos in June 2023. Presented by the Nikos Poulantzas Institute, it examines migration through maritime routes shaped by desperation and deterrence policies that erode democratic values. Painting, sculpture, installation, video art, and mixed media form a dense field of visual testimony, alongside Yannis Behrakis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from Idomeni.
Housed in the former military police headquarters at Parko Eleftherias, the Athens Municipality Arts Center has increasingly focused on exhibitions engaging with political memory, state violence, and democratic accountability, placing Blind Spot within an ongoing institutional conversation rather than as a standalone gesture.
Vasilissis Sofias 1, Athens
Eleni Psyllaki, Let Your Dreams Flow Inside Me, The Breeder
Dates: January 22 – February 21, 2026
At first glance, the works appear rigorously ordered. Spend time with them and a quieter tension emerges. Psyllaki draws on architectural training, mythological references, and the human figure to construct paintings where precision never erases the presence of the hand. Repeating motifs, vessels, paired forms, balanced structures, suggest intimacy and interdependence as compositional logic rather than metaphor.
Iasonos 45, Metaxourgeio
Kyriaki Goni, Telling the Bees, The Breeder
Dates: January 22 – February 21, 2026
Conceived as an evolving ecosystem rather than a closed exhibition, Telling the Bees unfolds across video, sculpture, drawings, textiles, sound, and ritual objects. Research, folklore, speculative thinking, and feminist theory intersect alongside Telling the Bees (The Game), a video game developed as part of the same narrative world. The Beeseeker, moving through an Aegean landscape marked by environmental exhaustion, anchors an exploration of care, shared knowledge, and interspecies communication.
Iasonos 45, Metaxourgeio
Denise Eleftheriou, Fashion and Applied Arts Exhibition,
Dates: Opening January 22, 2026
The Benaki’s early-year program opens with a project that places material intelligence and making at the forefront. Presented at the Pireos 138 branch, Eleftheriou’s exhibition brings the logic of the workshop into the museum context, positioning contemporary design as a cultural practice shaped by labor, form, and production.
Beyond its temporary exhibitions, Pireos 138 functions as the Benaki’s contemporary core, hosting rotating shows devoted to modern Greek art, design, photography, and archival material, while the museum’s wider network across Athens traces Greek culture from antiquity to the present.
Koumpari 1, Kolonaki
Alexis Akrithakis, A Line Like a Wave, Benaki Pireos Annexe
Dates: February 12 – May 24, 2026
Rather than a chronological survey, this major retrospective reads Akrithakis through the persistence of the line. From early psychedelic works to a later graphic language, the exhibition traces how gesture became biography, humor, and conceptual pressure. Curated by Chloé Akrithaki and Alexios Papazacharias, the show argues for drawing as a complete way of thinking.
The exhibition sits alongside the Benaki’s permanent and semi-permanent displays, which connect twentieth-century visual culture with broader social and historical shifts in Greece.
Pireos 138, Tavros
Messolonghi 1826: 200 Years Since the Exodus, Benaki Museum
February 18 – May 3, 2026
Anniversary momentum shapes this exhibition, which revisits the Exodus of Messolonghi with an emphasis on its enduring resonance. The framing stresses continuity rather than closure, positioning the historical event as a living element of collective memory rather than a sealed chapter.
Koumpari 1, Kolonaki
Jeff Koons, Balloon Venus Lespugue (Orange), Museum of Cycladic Art
Dates: March 19 – August 21, 2026
Presented at the Stathatos Mansion of the Museum of Cycladic Art, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Venus Lespugue (Orange) is exhibited as a single sculptural work in dialogue with ten replicas of Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines. The sculpture draws directly from the Venus of Lespugue, a small mammoth-tusk ivory figurine carved around 28,000 years ago, long associated with exaggerated abstraction of the female body.
Influenced by this prehistoric form since the late 1970s, Koons revisits it through his Antiquity series, translating the compact original into a monumental, mirror-polished stainless-steel sculpture whose inflated scale and industrial surface radically shift its material and visual register. The work invites reflection on how a foundational archetype of fertility is reinterpreted across radically different historical, cultural, and material contexts.
The exhibition unfolds against the backdrop of the Museum of Cycladic Art’s permanent collections, which trace Cycladic civilization through marble figurines and everyday objects, alongside ancient Greek and Cypriot art, grounding the contemporary work in three millennia of Aegean visual culture.
Neophytou Douka 4, Kolonaki
Yorgos Lanthimos, Photographs, Onassis Stegi
Dates: March 7 – May 17, 2026
Known internationally for a body of films that redefined contemporary Greek cinema, Yorgos Lanthimos turns here to still images. The exhibition brings together photographs from the past five years, including work made around film productions and soundstage environments, alongside a distinct series created in Athens and the Aegean.
Emerging from the Greek New Wave with Dogtooth, Lanthimos went on to direct The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite, and most recently Poor Things, earning international awards and multiple Academy Award nominations. The photographs on view will reveal the same controlled strangeness, compositional rigor, and psychological tension that shape his films, offering insight into how his cinematic worlds are built visually before they reach the screen.
Tilda Swinton, Onassis Stegi
Date: June 16, 2025 to June 28, 2026
Elsewhere in the building, Onassis Stegi is also presenting one of its most personal and high-profile projects at Onassis Ready, where Tilda Swinton takes center stage in a deeply autobiographical exhibition developed with long-standing collaborators from film, fashion, and visual art.
The project brings together newly commissioned works and reconfigured pieces that move between cinema, installation, performance, and dress, including a newly created film and sculptural portrait, immersive environments, reworked film footage presented as installation, and a multi-day live presentation built around Swinton’s personal wardrobe of film costumes, garments, red-carpet looks, and family heirlooms.
Syngrou 107, Neos Kosmos
Looking Ahead
Spring – Autumn 2026
Lamassu of Nineveh – Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures, Old Acropolis Museum
Dates: October 2025 – October 31, 2026
The reopening of the Old Acropolis Museum marks a new chapter in a long-term collaboration between the Acropolis Museum and NEON. Central to this moment is Lamassu of Nineveh (2018), Michael Rakowitz’s monumental sculpture, originally installed in the outdoor garden of the Acropolis Museum and presented as part of the Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures trilogy, curated by Nikolaos Stampolidis and Elina Kountouri.
Reconstructed from empty cans of Iraqi date syrup, the sculpture reimagines the Assyrian Lamassu that once guarded the Nergal Gate of ancient Nineveh and was destroyed in 2015. Part of Rakowitz’s ongoing series The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, the work traces histories of displacement, loss, and survival through materials tied directly to human labor and damaged economies. With the reopening of the Old Acropolis Museum, the Lamassu will be placed there, entering into direct dialogue with ancient artefacts and extending its role as guardian into the present through memory rather than power.
“Desmotes” Archaeological Museum Shell, SNFCC
Date: Completion expected within 2026
One of the most significant archaeological discoveries of recent decades is being given a permanent home on the Faliro Esplanade, next to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. The so-called Desmotes of Faliro, 79 shackled skeletons dating to the second half of the seventh century BC, will be presented in a purpose-built museum structure designed to preserve both the remains and the gravity of the site. Funded with six and a half million euros through the Recovery Fund, the project is on track for completion in 2026.
The exhibition is conceived as a careful meeting of archaeology and history rather than a display of violence. Visitors will descend gradually below ground level, moving from the present into the ancient world, before encountering the remains through large glass openings, without entering the burial chamber itself. Contextual material places the executions within the political unrest of Archaic Athens, offering a measured understanding of a moment that shaped the city’s early social and civic transformation.
National Museum of Underwater Antiquities
Date: Opening date to be announced
Piraeus is set to gain a long-awaited national institution devoted entirely to underwater antiquities, housed within and connected to the historic SILO building at the city’s port. Scheduled to open in 2026, the National Museum of Underwater Antiquities will bring together more than 2,500 objects recovered from Greek seas, many of which have never been publicly displayed. The permanent collection spans ancient merchant shipwrecks, naval remains, and finds from Byzantine and early modern maritime history, offering a comprehensive view of Greece’s relationship with the sea.
The museum combines the restored 1930s industrial silo with a contemporary extension, preserving key elements of its working past while accommodating exhibition spaces, conservation laboratories, and research facilities. Advanced digital tools will allow visitors to explore submerged settlements, shipwrecks, hulls, and cargoes in detail, while a carefully structured exhibition route situates underwater archaeology within broader environmental, historical, and social contexts. By the time it opens, the museum is expected to stand not only as a landmark for Piraeus, but as a defining statement of Greece’s commitment to safeguarding its maritime heritage for future generations.
Tatoi Estate: A Historic Landscape Reopens to the Public
Date: Winter 2026
Set on the northern edge of Athens, beneath the slopes of Mount Parnitha, the Tatoi Estate is approaching a long-anticipated reopening in 2026. Once the summer residence of Greece’s royal family, the estate is being reintroduced not as a monument to monarchy but as an expansive cultural and environmental park shaped for public use.
Restoration began in 2019 and has gradually brought the estate’s core buildings and grounds back into working condition. The former palace has undergone extensive structural and interior conservation, while outdoor infrastructure, pathways, and planting schemes are redefining the surrounding landscape. Several secondary buildings are also gaining new roles: the old stables are being adapted into a museum dedicated to royal carriages, and the New Dairy will host exhibitions exploring both the site’s agricultural history and its use as a royal retreat, alongside spaces for talks and cultural programming.
When the estate reopens, visitors will have access to a network of restored buildings, gardens, and exhibition spaces that examine modern Greek history through architecture, land use, and conservation practice. Long abandoned after the abolition of the monarchy in 1973, Tatoi is now being reshaped as a shared civic space—one that acknowledges its complex past while establishing a clear, contemporary role within Greece’s cultural landscape.
