5 Great Virtual Art Exhibitions to Visit in March

One year on, the resourceful and resilient galleries of Athens continue to find engaging ways to captivate our senses and channel the city’s bold artistic impulses, while their doors remain largely shuttered. This is Athens' resident art expert, Kiriakos Spirou, lists five fascinating digital exhibitions to quench your culture cravings in this month of March. 

Gardening at Zoumboulakis Galleries

With spring’s arrival, the Zoumboulakis Galleries has created Athens’ first indoor botanical garden exhibition. In the vast basement space of its Kolonaki Square site (there’s a second Zoumboulakis space on Kriezotou dedicated to design), you can take a virtual stroll through green-thumbed works by twenty artists, both from Greece and abroad. The exhibition Gardening is a thought-provoking take on our pandemic-struck world, as well as a witty “return to nature” through a mix of painting, sculpture, installations and video. Thanks to the fresh eye of curator Georgia Liapi, who recently joined the gallery, the exhibition combines works by young and emerging artists, such as Yorgos Maraziotis and Melina Mosland, with more established gallery stalwarts like Stefanos Rokos and Nikos Tranos.
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Feels like home at EMST

Privacy, childhood, the family, safety and our need to belong are some of the primal themes explored in this digital display that features exhibits from Athens’ newest culture hub, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST). Feels like home examines how artists have been engaging with these universal concepts of home in their work, with items by established Greek and foreign artists (there’s even a  Magritte sculpture included). The exhibition is one of three chapters of the digital project Visualising Humanity, organised by the Network of Contemporary Culture Museums of the Ministry of Culture.
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The Studio of Yiannis Pappas by the Benaki Museum

The late great sculptor Yiannis Pappas was a pivotal figure of Greek post-war art, not least because of his many commissions for public sculptures in cities and institutions all around Greece (if you pass Zappeio park, make sure to clock his statue of Alexander the Great on the corner of Amalias Avenue). Pappas’ former Athens home and studio in Zografou is an extraordinary place, filled with his bronze and marble sculptures, studies and drawings. In fact, this is the largest trove of the artist’s work, which he donated to the Benaki Museum in 2002, three years before his death. This well-produced virtual exhibition leads you step by step through the studio, with sound-guide snippets in several languages attached to important exhibits.
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Posterity at The Blender Gallery

A small cultural hub for the southern suburbs of Athens, The Blender Gallery in glitzy Glyfada stages several exhibitions and live events throughout the year. Its current show (curated by Nestoras Katsimichas) features an impressive haul of 100 rare posters collected by Bosnian Serb engraver Milan Zunic. Originating from the 1960s onwards, the posters were produced in Eastern European countries (including former Eastern Germany), and are great examples of how graphic design and communication can leave room for authentic artistic expression.
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Stella Kapezanou at Evripides Gallery

One of the most imaginative young Greek contemporary painters around, Stella Kapezanou is in constant dialogue with pop aesthetics and art-history motifs, using a very personal, colour-drenched visual language. Highly-stylised people inhabit surrealistically patterned backgrounds, and albeit they appear immersed in glamour and luxury, their decadence is undermined by subtle humour and irony. Kapezanou is staging her second solo show at Kolonaki's Evripides Gallery, which is also presented in satisfying detail in the gallery's virtual viewing room.
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