Show on the visual arts, produced in 2024

"The Era of Images" (2003-2023 ERT) completed 20 years of steady presence and documentation of the contemporary art scene in Greece and abroad. During these 20 years, a national, as well as an international, archive for contemporary art was created, allowing the audience to get acquainted with great artists, major exhibitions, museums, and collectors. Katerina Zacharopoulou, who has been curating, researching, and presenting "The Era of Images" for 20 years, continues to document this exciting and modern world of art. Its messages, quests, and forms are aligned with crucial issues of the era, such as identities, ecologies, collectivities, generations of Greek and foreign artists, and the re-evaluation of their works, the body, the presentation of traditional forms of art within new frameworks and languages, museums, their new goals, painting, sculpture, and moving image through different readings of the World, places, and their history.

The new season of initially 12 episodes focuses on artists and exhibitions that at this moment redefine all these issues, in the way museums perceive their museumological and social role, with new practices and narratives, making tangible the fact of a rapidly changing world.

Who is Marcel Duchamp?

in light of the exhibition of works by Marcel Duchamp, presented for the first time in Greece by the Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery, the show features a historical tribute to the artist who defined conceptual art and laid the foundations for contemporary art.
The exhibition's title, Re(a)Duchamp, refers to a new reading of his personality and work. The idea and curation of the exhibition belong to Kyriakos Sarris, an artist, doctor, and scholar of Duchamp's work. In an interview with Katerina Zacharopoulou, Sarris speaks with deep knowledge of the artist's history, the significance of his iconic works, and his successive periods in defining the object as ready-made. He also discusses the notes, some of which were presented in the exhibition. Other participants in the show include Eleftheria Tseliou, who discusses the challenge of collecting works for her gallery, Nikos Daskalothanasis, professor of art history at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and writer Thanos Stathopoulos. Each offers a different perspective on Marcel Duchamp, bringing forward a re-reading, not only of his works but also of his personality. The works on display and featured in the program come from private collections and institutions from Europe and America.

Here is an excerpt from Kyriakos Sarris’s words on Marcel Duchamp's work, featured in the program and included in the book published by AGRA for the exhibition:

"As he gathers and processes a series of notes and studies on glass, Duchamp comes up with the idea of placing painting at the service of reasoning. The strategic move to achieve this goal is the shift from the aesthetic allure of the visual object to the allure of philosophical engagement with the ontology of the work. What follows, without delving into details, opens two paths with decisive consequences for contemporary art. First, the rediscovery, at the end of the '50s, of Marcel Duchamp as a constructor of objects rather than as a member of the surrealist group that had fled to America, by the couple Rauschenberg–Johns, and the involvement of British artist Richard Hamilton in the study and typographic reproduction of his notes, leading to neo-dadaism and pop art. Second, at the end of the '60s, the re-reading of Duchamp’s work by the 'gang of wizards who disappear objects' (Kosuth, Huebler, Weiner, etc.) brings forth the conceptual art movement.