Katia Varvaki is participating with Art Prisma gallery (Section A5), in the International Contemporary Art Fair of Athens, Art Athina 2018. Blooming Frida consists of two different portraits of Frida Kalo, mixed media, 80x80 cm each, that took months to complete. The Art Athina 2018 will take place June 21–24 at the Athens Conservatoire (Vasileos Georgiou B 17, 106 74 Athens.
As part of the Tolstoy Weekend Festival, on June 9, 2018 at 20:00 an exhibition of paintings by Greek artists based on Leo Tolstoy’s works, Άξιος Εστι – To Be Truly Meet, will open in the exhibition hall of the Volkonsky House. Katia Varvaki is taking part in the exhibition with the painting Anna Karenina.
The exhibition includes works by nineteen modern Greek artists. Each of them has his own technique and manner of painting, and his own understanding of the world, but they are all united by their interest in Tolstoy‘s heritage and love for heroines of Russian classical literature. Specially for this exhibition, the artists were rereading Leo Tolstoy‘s works for two years, and later were able to present their original interpretations of female images of the novels Family Happiness, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection.
The title of the exibition is an allusion to the poem It Is Truly Meet by Odysseus Elytis - a Greek poet, the Nobel Prize Winner in 1979. Axion Esti is about the cretion of the world and horrors of war, about one‘s native land and love of it. All these topics are kin to the work of Leo Tolstoy who was greatly influenced by Greek language and culture.
As a young man, Tolstoy got interested in Greek poetry and literature. At first in Russian, then in Greek, he read The Iliad and The Odyssey, and works of Xenophon and Herodotus, translated the Gospels from Greek, and, when working on his ABC Book, referred to Aesop’s fables. In February of 1871, he wrote to A. Fet: “I truly live in Athens. I speak Greek in my sleep.”
The exhibition is organized by the Yasnaya Polyana Museum and the MaLou Art Consulting & Gallery.
The exhibtion will be open in the Volkonsky House from June 10 to June 16, 2018. It can be visited from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 to 16:00.
From June 20 to July 8, 2018, the exhibition will be open at the Yasnaya Polyana Gallery. It can be visited from Tuesday to Sunday, from 11:00 to 18:00.