A Tribute to Yannis Moralis

In 1988, the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum organised the first major retrospective exhibition of Yannis Moralis. This retrospective traced the artist’s creative development and demonstrated the quality and consistency of his work. It was during the same year that Yannis Moralis made a generous donation of 113 of his works to the National Gallery. One year after his death, our museum felt that a meaningful overview of the donation in its entirety was due as a tribute to the great artist.
Yannis Moralis is an emblematic figure of an artist who left a unique imprint on the identity of Modern Greek art through both his work and his teaching at the Athens School of Fine Arts.
The exhibition dedicated to the artist mainly comprises the artist’s substantial donation to the museum, including paintings, drawings and engravings. Six productive decades, from 1930 to the mid-1980s are represented in the art works in the National Gallery collections.
The exhibition aims to provide an overview of Moralis’s entire artistic career as defined by the artist himself through the works of his donation to the National Gallery, “the treasury of Modern Greek art”.
The exhibit is augmented by a series of paintings dating from the artist’s last creative period, today in private collections. In this way, visitors to the exhibition will glean an overview of the artist’s overall creative development.
Committed to figurative painting and a lover of moderation, Yannis Moralis assimilated in his own way the lessons of modernism, combining the exciting developments of modernism with a contemporary reading of tradition; the successor of the Generation of the Thirties, the artist is indeed a true 20th-century classic.
Structured around the historic exhibitions by the artist, the display of Yannis Moralis’s works is illustrated by their reception from the media in articles in the daily and periodical press, which outline the historical horizon of expectation of both the public and criticism, establishing a dialogue with the works at the time of their emergence.

Exhibition Curator: Annie Malama, Curator, National Gallery of Greece

Sponsor: Proton Bank