The ATHENS PRINTMAKING CENTER – PANDOLFINI & SIATERLI N.P.O. presents the commemorative exhibition Tavy Notton & Lela Paschali: A Printmakers’ Counterpoint at the ETCH INK art space between March 6 – 28, 2026.

The exhibition features a unique visual dialogue between two etching masters, both from George Kostopoulos’ important Grands Livres collection. The exhibition  offers a rare opportunity to observe how two distinct hands could portray the same deeply seated anxiety regarding the human condition of their times. The two artists Tavy Notton (1914-1977) and Lela Paschali (1914-1977) were contemporaries, they were tireless and firmly focused on the ailing humanity at the heart of their hearts. Notton and Paschali are not merely represented by separate individual works; their creations are engaged in a coherent conversation revealing their shared roots first in the European tradition of the arts and second in their common experiences during Greece’s traumatic 1940s.

Our two print makers’ adherence to the European value system—which closely coincides with the origins of typography—has clearly yielded bodies of work that aim beyond aesthetic excellence; their craft achieving incisive forms of social criticism and empathy. Theirs is an art that was forged in the late 1930s and through the subsequent darkest years caused by the Axis occupation of Greece. From the Byzantine monasteries of Boeotia to the grim reality of the Averoff Prisons and the starving children of 1943 Athens, the prints stand as a staggering chronicle of survival and enduring faith in humanity.The exhibition presents two cycles of brilliant workmanship in two illustrated books of original etchings in dialogue with one another.

Visitors will have the opportunity to view Notton’s work through his 1951 illustrations of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. His images speak of confinement and the punishing  humiliation of the condemned anti-hero. With razor-sharp detail and technical mastery, Notton’s depiction of incarceration plumbs both visual and spiritual depths. Every scene or detail intensifies the bleak, suffocating sense of psychological imprisonment and personal effacement not to mention the doomed struggle for survival against annihilation.

Lela Paschali’s work responds, one might say, through the illustration of Jehan Rictus’s Le Coeur Populaire (A Folk’s Heart,1950). Her images lead the visitor to the cabarets and slums of Paris, capturing even the exact second of social ruination. In settings where Norton perceives analogies of spiritual sublimation, Paschali evokes raw instances of the Parisian stigmatized. Her lines converse with Notton’s somber scenes even as she presents scenes of decay and exploitation: from the barefoot children on Parisian streets and the hunched bodies of men and women to the rows of housing in mortified decrepitude.Paschali’s unflinching directness with the human abjection firmly rejects any hint of idealization or embellishment.

Parallel Event:
On the evening of Friday, March 27, Petros Christakis will present a musical performance on guitar, inspired by the works featured in the exhibition.

The exhibition text by Stavros Deligiorgis.

Biography
Stavros Deligiorgis’ (b. 1933; Yale Univ. M.A., U. of Calif. Berkeley, Ph.D.) university teaching and research interests typically deal with such subjects as the theory and practice of translation, the poetics of medieval European literatures East and West, and persisting misprisions in the domain of the history of ideas since Arthur Lovejoy. Deligiorgis has taught for extended periods of time at educational institutions in Iowa, Trieste, Bucharest, and Athens. He is an Honorary Doctor of the University of Athens School of Philosophy.

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ETCH INK art space

16 Argyroupoleos St., Lycabettus, 114 71, Athens
Opening: Friday, March 6, 18:30 – 22:30
Exhibition Duration: March 6 – 28, 2026
Opening Hours:
Wednesday – Thursday – Friday: 18:00 – 21:00 & Saturday: 11:00 – 15:00
Contact: [email protected] | www.athens-printmaking.com