The ATHENS PRINTMAKING ART CENTER – PANDOLFINI & SIATERLI C.N.P.P. presents the exhibition Mario Prassinos: Instinctive landscapes with etchings from the George Kostopoulos Collection, taking place at the ETCH INK art space from 14 March until 12 April 2025.

Selected prints from the George Kostopoulos Collection will inaugurate the exhibition program of the spring season at ETCH INK art space, presenting unique and rare works from the collection to the audience, bringing visual artists, theoreticians, art lovers and researchers in touch with the Marios Prassino’s artistic body of works. The exhibition features large-scale etchings and silkscreens, illuminating aspects of the pioneering artist’s trajectory, with a focus on his prints, a part of his oeuvre which is less widespread and less known to the Greek audience. Prassinos’ print production is directly connected to his book illustrations of classical literary works and poems. The exhibition also presents the entire series of coloured etchings for the illustration of Arthur Rimbaud’s renowned poem “Une saison en enfer” (A season in hell), which he created in 1966 for Les Bibliophiles Comtois publications.

Mario Prassinos’ (1916 – 1985) multifaceted artistic work combines a variety of media such as painting, printmaking, book illustrations, graphic arts, scenography, tapestry, writing and art theory. His work interweaves representation, abstraction and spontaneous gestures. From the primary surrealist influences of his early works, he gradually developed a distinct personal style. By the time he traveled to Greece in the late 1950s, he had already embarked on a systematic study and observation of the landscape. The works of the exhibition reveal Prassinos’ interest in the landscape through abstract, fluid and explosive compositions. Nature is illustrated through abstraction, gestural and colorful forms, intertwined signs, lines, fluid and complex geometries unfurling in eruptive, sharp and elegiac landscapes. His imagery reveals the multiple aspects of nature perceived through the artist’s personal gaze. The natural landscapes and trees in his work encapsulate psychic and spiritual tensions, revealing an entirely new world liberated from the  categorizations, constraints and norms of the existing reality. Prassinos’ works allow for free association, automatic projections and imagination, while his images remain open and elliptical in their interpretation.

George Kostopoulos notes: “I became acquainted with the work of Mario Prassinos around 1980 thanks to a book illustration of etchings. It was “L’instant fatal”, a book by renowned author Raymond Queneau. I was fascinated by the quality of his work and I gradually discovered his vast oeuvre over the years. From exhibitions, auctions, private collections and the internet, I collected most of his prints and book illustrations. Instinctive landscapes exhibition, presented in collaboration with Athens Printmaking Art Centre – Pandolfini and Siaterli, showcases selected large-scale etching from the collection, created between 1956 and 1978. Visitors will have the opportunity to become acquainted and enjoy Mario Prassinos as an intellectual, an artist, as well as as an acclaimed and esteemed creator in Greece and abroad.

The exhibition is accompanied by a special publication dedicated to the prints and etchings of Mario Prassinos from the George Kostopoulos Collection, featuring a theoretical text by Professor Emeritus and Art Historian Manos Stefanidis. The catalogue was first published in 2024 on the occasion of the exhibition “Mario Prassinos and the images of the deep sea” at the Hambis Municipal Printmaking Museum in Nicosia.

Guided tour

During the exhibition there will be an open guided tour by Professor Emeritus and Art Historian Manos Stefanidis. The tour will be free for the audience and the accurate dates will be announced soon.

 

ETCH INK art space

Argyroupoleos 16, Lycabettus, 114 71, Athens

Opening

Friday 14th March 2025, 6:30pm – 10:30pm

Duration

14 March – 12 April 2025

Opening days & hours

Wednesday – Thursday – Friday 17.00 – 21.00 & Saturday 11.00 – 15.00

Info | [email protected] | www.athens-printmaking.com

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Biography

Marios Prassinos was born in 1916 in Istanbul but grew up and studied in Paris, where he moved with his family after the expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Turkey in 1922. In 1932, he enrolled at the Ecole des Langues Orientales and had his first painting lessons with Clement Serveau. Two years later he began to study at the Faculte des Lettres in Paris. Both he and his sister, Gisele, who had just published articles in magazines such as “Documents 34” and “Minotaure”, were part of the broader circle of the surrealists. He had his first solo exhibition in 1938 at the art gallery of Pierre Vorms, who had discovered the artist at the Salon des Surindependants. He met key figures of the French avant garde such as Jean Cocteau, Raymond Queneau, Gallimard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet και Albert Camus. His work was born and flourished in the context of the avant-garde movements that shaped and influenced the visual arts and literature of the period.

Characteristic of his work is his involvement with the theatre, his production of book illustrations and covers, his ongoing interest in transcending the threshold between knowledge and intuition, between the physical and the metaphysical world, and his approach to painting as writing. These are the main directions in his work, which also reflect the topics he investigated, from his earlier work, consisting of portraits and self-portraits already in a surrealistic direction, to the introversion of his renderings of the natural landscape, after he moved to Eygalieres, in the South of France.