Astralón Suggests : Art Calendar | June 2025
June is shaping up to be a great month for art lovers in Greece.
From Athens to Thessaloniki, museums and galleries are serving up a fresh mix of exhibitions that explore everything from identity and mythology to animal rights and surreal worlds.
Whether you’re into bold paintings, curious characters, or thought-provoking themes, there’s something here for you. Astralón’s team picked out four standout shows, so here’s what to visit this month.
Cycladic Blues | Exhibition
Artist: Marlene Dumas
Location: Museum of Cycladic Art | Athens
Duration: 05/06/2025 – 02/11/2025
Marlene Dumas (b. 1953, Cape Town) is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art, known for radically expanding the vocabulary of painting. Drawing from an extensive archive of images – including art history, mass media, and personal photographs – Dumas creates emotionally charged works that explore the complexities of the human condition. Her paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in leading museums around the world.
Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues, her first solo museum exhibition in Greece, presents more than thirty paintings and works on paper, displayed in dialogue with ancient artifacts from the Museum’s permanent collection.
Curated by independent curator Douglas Fogle in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition spans two decades of Dumas’ practice and includes newly completed works. Together, these pieces offer a compelling cross-section of the artist’s eerily beautiful and provocative representations of the human body
For more information, visit the Museum’s website.
The Enlightened Ones, The Green Horses and Some More Bitches | Exhibition
Artist: Marianna Ignataki
Location: MOMus | Thessaloniki
Duration: 05/06/2025 – 14/09/2025
In a world where hostility is increasing towards any person who dares to question the boundaries and borders of bodies and earth, in a society where the concept of gender includes all the anxieties, neuroses and concerns of modern man, the… creatures of the artist Marianna Ignataki compose a utopia, a place of alternative communities, where we all fit in and can be free. Her solo exhibition is the second production in the museum’s Case Studio space, which is dedicated to the here-and-now of contemporary art and seeks to offer visibility to young and established artists and to bring the museum even closer to contemporary artistic creation.
Using watercolor, drawing, painting and sculptural installations, Marianna Ignataki creates characters outside of boundaries, frames and identities, in a surrealistic universe. Her work ranges from minimalist scenes and portraits to exaggerated, kitschy, rococo inspired compositions.
Marianna Ignataki was born in Thessaloniki in 1977. She studied Architecture at the Technische Universität in Vienna and Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts of Saint-Etienne. Between 2010-2017 she was based in Beijing. She now lives and works between Berlin and Athens.
Click here for more.
In the workshop of Christophoros Katsadiotis | Exhibition
Artist: Christophoros Katsadiotis
Location: Benaki Museum | Athens
Duration: 29/05/2025 – 27/07/2025
Christophoros Katsadiotis creates a monumental workshop, a hybrid space, where the art of printmaking reaches new limits, and the work of the printmaker is not merely exhibited – it is revealed.
The artist, who divides his time between Paris and Athens, prepares his printing plates in France and prints them by hand in his Athenian studio. There, among presses, old radios and papers, unclassifiable figures are born. Zoomorphic, distorted faces, as if drawn from a dark fairy tale or allegory. They possess no heroism, they seek no redemption. They are the “stateless” of everyday life – faces of decay and debauchery. And yet, in them Katsadiotis detects “the rage for life.” The tension between beauty and pain. In these faces, he recognizes everyday heroes, those who survive without belonging anywhere.
Katsadiotis’ prints are accompanied by the very materials that constitute him: notes, clippings, photographs, objects he has collected from the trash – “parasites” of the city recycled into works of printmaking. Alongside these, video and sound complete an experience that is not only visual, but audiovisual. In this personal cabinet de curiosités, the unique animation proposed by the restless creator functions as an extension of his printmaking. It gives motion to stillness, voice to silence. Katsadiotis’ works at the Benaki Museum gain autonomy, like scenes from an underground film, a narrative that does not suggest, but reveals.
Learn more here.
Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives |Group Exhibition
Location: EMST | Athens
Duration: 16/5/2025 – 15/02/2026
Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives centres on animal rights and animal well-being, highlighting the urgent need to recognise and defend the lives of non-human animals in an anthropocentric world that exploits, oppresses and brutalises them. The exhibition is inspired by John Berger’s seminal essay of the same name, “Why Look at Animals?” (1980), which explores the changing relationship between humans and animals, particularly in the context of modernity.
Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives aims to engender a discussion around the ethics and politics of how we treat animals. By exposing the exploitative, violent mechanisms behind systemic animal abuse, it renders what is shamefully invisible visible. The exhibition and its public programme hope to raise awareness of the conditions of non-human animal life today.
The exhibition puts into question human exceptionalism, and aims to confront one of the carefully hidden and largely unspoken crimes of humanity on a mass scale: that of the daily, institutionalised, systematic violence against animals – whether directly or indirectly – a violence that denies them their basic natural rights. With this project EMΣT places ecological justice and the rights of non-human life at the heart of its programming for the months to come. Any serious engagement with climate justice and environmental protection must therefore involve animals as an integral part of the conversation.
Learn more here.
