ATHENS.- The Benaki Museum presents the landmark retrospective exhibition Alexis Akrithakis. A Line like a Wave, surveying the entire creative journey of the seminal Greek artist Alexis Akrithakis. The exhibition is jointly organized by the Benaki Museum and the Akrithakis Archive, is curated by Chloe Akrithaki and Alexios Papazacharias, and will be open until May 24, 2026.

The exhibition also marks the beginning of the Benaki Museum’s collaboration with Rolex as the “Official Watch of the Benaki Museum,” which integrates the Athenian museum into the global network of leading cultural institutions supported by the Swiss house.

The exhibition Alexis Akrithakis. A Line like a Wave brings together over 250 selected works from private and public collections. They span the artist's entire creative career and are arranged chronologically. For the first time in a retrospective, Akrithakis’s earliest works appear alongside pieces completed just before his death. The exhibition presents Akrithakis’s pictorial world, laden with with signature motifs-eyes, hearts, arrows, bows, suitcases, boats, and waves, while following his explorations in painting, materials, and construction, and emphasizing the distinctive use of color that defines his work.

Direct, incisive, and subversive, Alexis Akrithakis’s works occupy a unique place in modern Greek art. With unguarded honesty, a personal visual vocabulary, disciplined use of color, and unwavering thematic focus, Akrithakis—until his premature death—built a prolific and diverse body of work that remains instantly recognizable.

The exhibition is structured around major thematic sections drawn from key creative periods of the artist. The psychedelic temperas of the 1960s, the intensely political works of the early 1970s, the suitcase and driftwood constructions of the 1970s, the light-bulb constructions of the 1980s, the paintings of the 1990s depicting older sketches, and his final poignant works featuring portraits of the “madmen” and inmates of the Dromokaiteio psychiatric hospital form the backbone of the exhibition. The presentation is further complemented by smaller groups of distinctive works previously shown in solo exhibitions organized by the artist himself, such as kites, the Circus series, airplanes, and flowers for his friends who committed suicide, among others, illuminating his multidimensional sensitivity toward reality and his critical stance against pretension.

Coinciding with the Alexis Akrithakis. A Line like a Wave exhibition, Agra Publications has released a volume under the same name, edited by Chloe Akrithaki and Alexios Papazacharias and designed by Lila Palaiologou. This comprehensive, multilayered book delivers thorough editorial analysis of the work and the path of one of contemporary Greek art’s leading figures. The 320-page publication, available in separate Greek and English editions, stands as an independent publishing project, offering detailed insight into Alexis Akrithakis’s artistic methods and philosophy.

Alexis Akrithakis (1939–94): Alexis Akrithakis was born in Athens in 1939. From a young age, he engaged with leading intellectuals, and conversations with them shaped his artistic vision. He lived and worked in Paris (1958–60) and Berlin (1968–84), settling there with a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship. In 1984, he returned permanently to Greece. His work encompasses painting, drawing, constructions, and books, and his dynamic creativity also extended to furniture and stage design.

After his death in 1994, his work was presented in major retrospective exhibitions: in 1997–98 at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki and at the National Gallery in Athens, and in 2003 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. More recently, in 2018, the exhibition “The Stories of Alexis Akrithakis” was presented at the Athens Municipality Arts Center (Parko Eleftherias), and in 2019, the exhibition “tsiki-tsiki” was organized at the Benaki Museum.