Aileen Agopian Athens Summer City Guide
Welcome to APAA’s summer series celebrating the intersection of travel and art around the world. This new collection spotlights insider perspectives from our global membership, as we invite members to share personal guides to their cities—highlighting favorite restaurants, bars, things to do, and, most importantly, local art.
Our series next takes us to Athens, Greece, with a thoughtfully curated guide by APAA member Aileen Agopian, who explores where contemporary art and antiquity meet in vivid, unforgettable ways.
Epic Exhibitions
Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues
at the Museum of Cycladic Art
Dumas’s first solo museum show in Greece features over 40 works spanning three decades, including two major new paintings. Her work is beautifully shown in dialogue with ancient Cycladic and Hellenistic artifacts she personally selected, offering a poetic, oftentimes unsettling meditation on the body and time, rooted in antiquity, yet strikingly contemporary.
On view through November 2, 2025
Exhibition view of "Cycladic Bluesat." Paris Tavitian © Museum of Cycladic Art.
Charline von Heyl: The Giddy Road to Ruin
at the George Economou Collection
This is Charline von Heyl’s first major survey show in Greece. Spanning works from the 1990s to the present, von Heyl's exhibition interweaves abstract painting, drawing, collage and photographic elements.
On view through March 2026
Installation view of “Charline von Heyl: The Giddy Road to Ruin." Image courtesy of The George Economou Collection.
Allspice / Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures
at the Acropolis Museum
Rakowitz pairs his recreations of Assyrian and Mesopotamian artefacts with ancient relics from Mesopotamia and Cyprus. The exhibition weaves these elements in a politically urgent dialogue addressing displacement and memory to forge new cultural narratives. Then you can visit the Acropolis Museum, which is phenomenal.
On view through October 31, 2025
Image courtesy of the Acropolis Museum.
In a Bright Green Field
at Benaki Museum
Organized by the New Museum and DESTE Foundation in partnership with the Benaki, the exhibition features the work of 29 emerging Greek and Cypriot artists. Across a wide range of media, the artists explore the thematic of new ecological futures and collective life rooted in local histories and landscapes.
On view through September 13, 2025
Installation view of "In a Bright Green Field." Photo by Giorgos Sfakianakis.
Simone Leigh: Anatomy of Architecture
at The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center
Leigh’s three monumental bronze sculptures exhibited in the open-air Agora, mark her first exhibition in Greece. Through Leigh's sculptural language she draws attention to Black female identity, strength, and untold histories that resonate powerfully in public spaces.
On view through October 31, 2025
Installation view of “Anatomy of Architecture." Image courtesy of El Culture.
Godly Galleries
Antonis Donef: Time's Witness
at Kalfayan Galleries
Donef deftly transforms printed archival pages from encyclopedias, dictionaries and maps, into immersive painting. With ink, collage, and spontaneous calligraphic writing, Donef creates paintings described as a "library of time" where memory, knowledge, humor, and imagination coexist in layered visual narratives.
On view through September 6, 2025
Antonis Donef, "Untitled," 2025. Image courtesy of Kalfayan Galleries.
Enjoy a delicious lunch in Kolonaki after visiting Kalfayan Galleries.
Image courtesy of the Papadakis Restaurant.
Haris Epaminonda: VOL XXXIII
at Sylvia Kouvali Gallery
Epaminonda's show unfolds as a delicate choreography of found book pages, vessels, architectural fragments, and small personal objects subtly suspended or arranged in space, where absence becomes material and memory structures emerge from silence and tension.
On view through September 20, 2025
Installation view, Haris Epaminonda, ‘VOL. XXXIII’, Sylvia Kouvali, Piraeus, 2025. Image courtesy of Sylvia Kouvali Gallery.
Worth an Excursion: Hydra
Andra Ursuta: Apocalypse Now and Then
at the Deste Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra
A phenomenal experience as Ursuța transforms the raw, evocative site into a fictional archaeological ruin where uncanny bronze sculptures blur myth and material in unsettling yet mesmerizing ways. The exhibition feels cinematic, where the fractured relics of an imagined civilization hover between collapse and creation set against the dramatic Aegean backdrop. And it's Hydra, a magical place where time slows down, an island with no cars, no motorbikes, only donkeys and footpaths, where the absence of noise makes space for beauty!
On view through October 31, 2025
Installation view “Apocalypse Then and Now.” Courtesy of the artist, David Zwimer and Ramiken. Photo by Dario Lasagni.
