The Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens presents a painting exhibition by Andreas Georgiadis entitled 'Come Back' at the Makriyannis Wing of the  from June 23rd 2022, curated by Maria Georgopoulou, director of the Gennadius Library with the support of Mikri Arktos.

All the works in the exhibition are ink on paper and scattered with references from Cavafy’s universe. They attempt to create a dialogue with the poet and his life as well as with leading figures of Cavafy’s oeuvre. In an entirely personal manner, Andreas Georgiadis creates a light of his own, translucent and rich with tonal gradations, often metaphysical, allowing shadow, dense and solid, to penetrate and to disturb the calm waters of his artistic adventure with inference, symbolism and uncertainty. The loci and paths of Cavafy’s life create a geography of remembrance, where absence and suggestion compose poetic atmospheres and metaphorical symbolisms, proposing various interpretations of the same stories.

Maria Georgopoulou, exhibition curator, notes that: “In his new exhibition Andreas Georgiadis converses with Cavafy’s poems in a manner that signals the immediacy but also the significance that space, place, history and people have for artistic creation. The earth tones used in the landscapes and the close-ups that capture not only the expression but also the personality of the individuals to whom the poet refers, create an artistic universe that brings us closer to the memory and the very creative process of Cavafy. In Georgiadis’s oeuvre, Alexandria is a faraway land: a magical, misty, fairytale place; a place that inspires the artist to go a hundred years back to the places where Cavafy lived. Alexandria’s streets, cafés, shops and houses, bring to mind not only the great Alexandrian poet but also a cosmopolitan world that no longer exists. The hazy, vivid landscapes urge you to create mental images, to allow your imagination to wander and to experience the place and its history. Georgiadis’s portraits are more personal. Beautiful and enigmatic, rendered with clarity and yet distant, they attempt to bridge the distance between the poem and its visualization in the artist’s imagination. Impressions that appear intangible, the portraits do not allow you to touch the youthful faces, even if they gaze directly at you.”

Dimitris Daskalopoulos writes about Andreas Georgiadis’s “Cavafic paintings” in the catalogue to the exhibition: “This exhibition doesn’t simply illustrate Cavafy’s verses. It constitutes a proposal and an interpretive attempt to convey the inner rhythm that runs through many erotic poems of the Alexandrian poet, as well as the atmosphere of his birthplace, as he sought to record it and as, even to this day, a traveler will still perceive it to be. Andreas Georgiadis produced his own personal and fascinating account, as he recorded it through his ongoing discourse with the poet C.P. Cavafy, and hammers out his own strong link in the chain of artists who have commented thus far on the poet. […] Georgiadis’s gaze does not limit itself to the poet’s persona or to certain surface elements that could be facilely utilized to declare to the viewer their linked origin. Artfully and methodically, he peels away poems, locations, and faces, to reveal the deeper joints and the inferences of Cavafy’s expression.”

The exhibition is enriched by rare archival material from the Gennadius Library and private collections relating to the poet’s publishing activity, manuscripts as well as a few of the poems Cavafy published privately during his lifetime.

Curriculum vitae

Andreas Georgiadis was born in 1972 in Thessaloniki. He lives and works in Athens. He studied painting under George Rorris, graphic design at the School of Graphic Arts and Artistic Studies in Athens and illustration in Orleans, France. He has had 13 solo art exhibitions in Greece and overseas and received major distinctions. His works have been acquired by museums, public and private collections, and have illustrated books and records. As a set designer he has helped design the B. and E. Goulandris Foundation as well as many exhibitions at the Gennadius Library, the Museum of Cycladic Art, the Benaki Museum and elsewhere. He also works in theatre as a set and costume designer. He heads the art team of Mikri Arktos publications.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Thursday, June 23 at 8.00pm.

The exhibition runs from: June 23rd to August 5th, 2022

Opening Hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12.00 - 18.00