The City of Athens Arts Center presents the solo exhibition of painter Manolis Mpitzos titled “Suspended Hopes,” curated by Paris Kapralos. The opening will take place on Tuesday 12 May, from 19:00 to 22:00.

The exhibition “Suspended Hopes” brings together a body of work that reflects the artist’s painting trajectory through a mature and coherent visual language. The work of Manolis Mpitzos is situated within contemporary European abstraction and develops as a systematic exploration of the pictorial surface as a field of inscription, memory, and construction. Horizontal zones, linear incisions, and concentrated chromatic intensities form a dynamic system of relationships that structures the viewer’s experience, activating concepts such as passage, transition, and uncertainty.

A central point of reference in the exhibition is the sea, as both an experiential and symbolic field. It appears as a place of transition, as a boundary and as a promise, as an experience that connects memory with expectation. Through the painting process, the sea is inscribed as a condition that contains the tension between loss and the persistence of life, between risk and hope. The pictorial surface sustains this tension, transforming the work into a space of reflection and experience.

The artist’s practice draws from postwar European abstraction and engages with artists such as Pierre Soulages, Antoni Tàpies, and Cy Twombly, in terms of the importance of materiality, gesture, and surface as a site of inscription. At the same time, it develops a personal visual language in which repetition, layering, and re-inscription function as fundamental structural elements of the image.

The exhibition unfolds as a unified environment, where the works are interconnected through morphological and conceptual affinities, forming a field of experience that invites the viewer to an active and embodied engagement. Viewing develops as a process of navigation, where proximity and distance reveal different levels of interpretation, reinforcing a sense of openness and indeterminacy.

Manolis Mpitzos is a painter, born in Kavala in 1955, and lives and works in Athens. He engaged with painting from an early age and shaped his artistic path through studies and guidance from Fine Arts professor D. Daniil and painter D. Chytiris, while also attending seminars at the Hellenic YWCA. He is a member of the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece. He held his first solo exhibition in 1990 and has since presented his work in six solo exhibitions in Athens and Thessaloniki, as well as in selected group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. His works are held in public and private collections, as well as in important exhibition and museum institutions. His work has been included in publications such as “Greek Painters” by Melissa Publications, “Philological May Day,” and “Who is Who in Greece,” and he has also created covers for literary and medical books. More information is available on his website HERE.

A catalogue in Greek and English has been published for the exhibition and is available free of charge in digital format to all visitors.

Venue: City of Athens Arts Center, Vasilissis Sofias Avenue, within Eleftherias Park (near Megaro Mousikis Metro Station)
Exhibition Duration: 12 – 17 May 2026 
Days / Hours: Wednesday – Friday 11:00 – 19:00, Saturday & Sunday 12:00 – 15:00

FREE ADMISSION

Under the Auspices