Yannis Gaitis: Everyone and Alone

The J. F. Costopoulos Foundation and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art co-produce a large survey of the entire creative work of Yannis Gaitis (1923-1984) under the curatorship of Denys Zacharopoulos and Katerina Koskina. The exhibition will last from Saturday, September 6 until Sunday, November 2, 2008.

Yannis Gaitis - his life and deeds, his work and times, his artistic course and his pictorial language - grows up during the Greek resistance to the German occupation, in the period spanning from the Metaxas dictatorship and up until the Greek civil war. After his expatriation, together with a part of his generation, to Paris, he will accomplish his work and personality. He will find there the way to the experimentation and the freedom of expression so typical of him. The change of tide from the European to the American influence and the subsequent international transfer of the criteria and conditions of intellectual and artistic life to the USA, mark his work and artistic directions in an atmosphere of unrest, while his influence both in Greece and internationally will not cease to be direct and decisive. His caustic humor and his critical and deeply political attitude give a fresh impetus to the art of his time and sharpen the ways art faces reality.

The exhibition at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, in the aftermath of the exhibition at the Benaki Museum in 2006, contains representative works from all the periods of the artist and is organized with the cooperation of his daughter, Ms. Loretta Gaitis-Charrat, an architect-museologist. The technical support of the installation has been assigned to the close collaborator of Gaitis, Mr. Gavrilos Michalis. The exhibition is accompanied by the monumental ?uvre-catalogue published in 2003 by the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation and Ms Loretta Gaitis-Charrat. A small catalogue will also be published on the occasion of the exhibition in Thessaloniki.

The Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, as it has been redefine through the reorganization of its collection, works and donations, is the appropriate place for a new reception of the work of Y. Gaitis and of the modern history of art through the itineraries of the international avant-garde and the crucial personalities, forms and works that mark Greek reality.

The J. F. Costopoulos Foundation, that undertook the cost of realization of this attempt in Thessaloniki, completes with this exhibition a program that aims at the retrospective presentation of the work of great artists, either Greek or of Greek origin, who have influenced visual arts scene and have aligned themselves to the avant-garde of contemporary art both in Greece and internationally.

Yannis Gaitis
Everyone and Alone

Kuratoren: Denis Zacharopoulos, Katerina Koskina