Featuring 70 works that Jannis Psychopedis himself chose to retain in his private collection, the exhibition “Jannis Psychopedis: Landscapes of Memory. The Ones I Kept” traces his artistic journey from 1962 to the present through a deeply personal narrative.
There is another way to look at an artist’s career, by following the works they themselves chose to keep. This is the idea at the centre of the exhibition “Jannis Psychopedis: Landscapes of Memory. The Ones I Kept”, currently on view at the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation Museum until 4 October.
Seventy works, spanning the period from 1962 to the present day, chart more than six decades of artistic practice. The exhibition is structured around 20 chapters, shaped by the artist’s own accounts and explanations, and follows key stages in his work, from the early years of his career and the political and social upheaval of the 1960s to his later explorations of memory, history, antiquity and contemporary life.
Among the sections is “Anatomy Lesson”, reflecting Psychopedis’s interest in anatomy, which dates back to his student years. The human body reappears elsewhere in the exhibition, including in works where faces bear wounds that are not always immediately visible. Even his nude figures are portrayed less as erotic forms than as fragile, almost wounded bodies.
In the series “The Letter That Never Arrived”, elements of everyday life and personal references come together through the use of disparate materials. A few years later, the artist’s move to Brussels in 1986 opened a new chapter. “Night in Brussels” explores the relationship between interior and exterior space, the private room and the city glimpsed beyond its windows.
History and politics resurface in a different form in the 1999 cycle “Homage to Goya”. Here, traumatic images from the past are linked to contemporary events in an explicit condemnation of war. The reference to Goya acts as a bridge between historical memory and the present, in a body of work in which painting takes on a distinctly anti-war character.
The exhibition also includes “The Oracle”, one of Psychopedis’s most emblematic works. Complex and multilayered in form, it brings together a broad set of themes moving between ancient and contemporary culture. This dialogue with classical antiquity continues in the works inspired by the devastating 2007 fires in Ancient Olympia, where the destruction of the natural landscape is connected to the image of a civilisation that remains alive in collective memory.
The most revealing key to understanding the exhibition lies in its title itself, “The Ones I Kept”. It refers to the works the artist chose to retain in his private collection from among the many he created over more than six decades. It is precisely this personal selection that allows us to see his artistic journey from a different perspective, through the works to which he himself chose to give a special place.
