Friday noon, I am at number 19 of Patriarchu Joachim in Kolonaki and ring the bell. While I wait to be opened, I notice the marble paneling in the entrance of a typical 60’s apartment building and the distinctive doorman’s desk to the side. I try a second time with the bell, it’s past four, no one will be here at this hour, I think and start to leave when I hear a noise on the intercom. They open for me and I go up to the fourth.
Since November 2018, the Citronne gallery has been housed there, expanding its activity from Poros to Athens. “Have you been knocking long enough?” the owner of the gallery, Tatiana Spinari-Pollali, asks me. “I was telling my colleague that they would knock and we wouldn’t listen to them,” he explains. This is a dialogue you normally have on the doorstep of an apartment when you pay a friendly visit, not when you go to see an exhibition.
The first thing that catches my eye when I cross the entrance are the two impressive Suns by Panos Charalambous, with tobacco leaves on canvas. Both works are placed in the spaces that would once function as a living room and dining room. I follow the “pipes” of the visual installation that run through the hall and I am led to the “bedroom”, to see the portrait of Takis Karnavas, singer of folk songs from Xiromero of Etoloakarnania, and also an aluminum plan of Lake Amvrakia. In Amvrakia.Mia, as is the title of Charalambous’s new solo exhibition, the artist introduces the rural landscape into the “landscape” of the apartment. “In this way, a scene is created based on contrasts, on the familiar juxtaposition between the countryside and the city,” says Tatiana, curator of the exhibition.
From the beginning, he had decided that he would maintain the “planning” of the apartment. “The typical arrangement of the rooms helps in the modular development of a theme and very often the space itself is part of the curatorial reasoning, as it happened with Mappemonde, the monumental sculpture of Giorgos Lappa, where a “house” was encased in another ». I ask her if she found it difficult that Citronne is not at street level, as is the case with the Poros site. “For me, this transition has a special meaning. From the traffic and noise of the street, the visitor comes to the welcoming silence of the apartment-gallery. He has the time and room for a gradual adjustment to what he is about to see. The visit is not random or opportunistic, but conscious and individually planned.”
“I never liked window shopping”
The next day in the morning I go to Heraklitou 3, where the actions of the Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery are housed on an elevated ground floor. This time no one greets me, the door opens automatically and I follow the echo of the voice of Kyrillos Sarris, who is giving the last guided tour to close the Re(a)Duchamp exhibition. Visitors are gathered around the curator at the back of the exhibition space. And in this case the form of the apartment has been preserved. “I wanted the gallery to be located in the center of Athens, specifically in Kolonaki. The options for spaces that were not apartments were minimal or unsuitable or extremely expensive”, explains Eleftheria Tseliou. She does not consider herself bound by the “compartmentalization” of the gallery and tells me that during the ten years she has presented a series of exhibitions (e.g. The Library Show, The Still-Life Show) which were extremely complicated to set up. “I never liked the shop window, nor the idea of seeing from the street what is happening inside the gallery. The small scale of the exhibition space creates familiarity for the visitor and facilitates the reading of the works, while also imposing an economy in the way the exhibitions will be organized.”
Psychological and aesthetic reasons were what prompted Sakis Papakonstantinou to open Crux Galerie in 2017 on an elevated ground floor of a wonderful apartment building from ’51, designed by Renos Koutsouris, at number 4 Sekeri Street. I catch a couple coming up to their house, they subtly ask me if I’m going to the gallery and hold the door for me to pass. I sit for a few minutes in the entrance with the impressive staircase and then visit the group exhibition Photography saved my life with Greek and foreign artists.
“I’m not interested in the spectacle,” says Mr. Papakonstantinou characteristically. “I was tired of this bombardment of visual information, I wanted a quiet time. The concept of a gallery as a “shop” did not suit me”. The three-room apartment that hosts the gallery’s activities gives you a strong sense of home, the walls are painted each time to enhance the atmosphere of each exhibition, while there are also various furniture and objects that facilitate the curatorial concept. “I love that they’re ringing the bell, that they’re looking forward to seeing what’s in the space. The element of surprise is a basic condition in art,” he argues.
Apartment restrictions
As I walk down Solonos to reach number 20, where Gallery 7 is housed, I wonder what the real reasons are behind this ever-growing trend. Were the gallerists driven to this solution by the prohibitive prices of professional spaces, or did they really bet on the element of surprise and a more conscious public visit to an art space?
“I love that they’re looking forward to seeing what’s in the space. The element of surprise is a basic condition in art.”
Sakis Papakonstantinou, owner of Crux Galerie
Lefteris Kanakakis, founder of Gallery 7 with his wife Maria, took this risk very early on. In 1983 he opened the gallery in a semi-basement apartment at Zalokosta 7, in an amazing building from the interwar period. He remained there until 2012, when he sought shelter in nearby streets. “The choice of a site with a storefront or street access was never raised,” he tells me from the raised ground floor of a typical 1950s block of flats. He is fascinated, he says, by the idea of an art space within the confines and limitations of an apartment, and this works enticingly for both visitors and residents of the apartment building. A neighbor asks him what they are setting up now. “Photo exhibition of Akis Detsis”, he answers her. “The opening is on April 23.” He cannot, however, tell me whether he has been harmed by this choice. “I don’t know, I haven’t experienced anything else. That was our way from the beginning.”
Behind the mirror
In a semi-basement at 87 Corfu in Kypseli, artist Angelos Plessas also housed PET Projects Studio. “Initially, I was looking for a space for a studio, but since it was 120 m2, I thought that I could also use it as an art space and curate informals and exhibitions of other artists.” I wonder if the name came from the pet shop that used to exist in the neighborhood. “And from this, and from the sculpture with the dog, homage to the man who fed and cared for strays in the area, but mainly because “pet project” in English means something you do out of interest and not out of duty.”
The semi-basement is part of a typical middle-class block of flats, one of those built in the 70s with consideration, and in the past it has functioned as a tailor’s workshop as well as a contractor’s storage space. From the outside, the space stands out, because Angelos has placed a mirror on the door. “I see them looking at each other or trying to see what’s inside, and the mirror reinforces the idea of mystery and surprise, which are building blocks for how the studio works.” The gallery opened in April 2019 with the exhibition Painting Entrance Todayin which visitors had to find the artist who had created a painting.
During the pandemic, the artist placed a light installation by Olga Miliaresi-Fokas in the courtyard area. “The project referred to the TV signal that came out on our screens when there was a problem with the transmission or when the daytime program ended. This installation stayed lit day and night, reminding us of what we were living. The neighbors came out on the balconies from the nearby apartment buildings and were fooling around. Now at the opening, when we go out into the courtyard, a lady from upstairs throws candy at us. I especially like that even the uncovered space has been creatively activated.” He explains to me that he doesn’t have gallery hours. “For someone to visit the studio, they have to call me, send me an email, make an appointment. I want to foster the feeling that PET Projects is not an ordinary gallery. It’s like a shelter, the visitor enters a personal and special space.”
Last I leave the FokiaNou Art Space in Pagrati (Ioannou Fokianou 24), which is housed on the seventh floor of a 1960s apartment building. Closed during the years of the crisis, the tiny apartment welcomed people again in 2014, when the visual artist Blanca Amezcua decided to turn it into an exhibition space. And when in 2016 he decided to return to New York, visual artists Panagiotis Voulgaris and Mary Kox, who had shown their work there, decided to continue it. Panagiotis claims that for many visitors the element of surprise works as a tickle, “since, apart from a poster at the entrance, you have no idea what you will see, until an apartment door opens and you encounter a new and exciting world”.
Many are also, he adds, fascinated by the view offered by the windows to the Athenian cityscape, while some show interest in individual elements of the apartment, such as the worn-out entrance wall. So what is it like to develop a theme in a small two? “Being both visual artists, we started organizing and setting up exhibitions specifically for FokiaNou. The form and small scale of the apartment gradually helped us to learn how it is done, often incorporating elements of it, while the view of the city from above is a constant source of inspiration. It couldn’t be otherwise, with the archetypal image of the surrounding apartment buildings and neighboring rooftops with antennas, conversing with Hymettos and Ardittos, invading through the windows into the space.”
