Artistic Allure Unveiled: Goya’s “Los Caprichos” and “The Seduction of the Stranger” Open on January

In the new year, the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum is ready to welcome visitors with new exhibitions, both in the main building and in the National Sculpture Gallery, as well as in the branches outside Athens. Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos and The Seduction of the Stranger.

Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos – Permanent Collection

Eighty engravings, etchings on paper and aquatints dating from 1797-98 are presented in a very important exhibition, accompanied by photographs of the preparatory drawings. This is Goya’s first series of engravings and the only one published during his lifetime. The series owned by the National Gallery was printed in 1803 and acquired in 1962, when M. Kalligas was director.

The series of engravings entitled Los Caprichos, which Francisco Goya published at the beginning of 1799, was a milestone in his artistic development, since it was the first time that the official painter of the Spanish court was able to express the revolutionary character of an art that had matured and was free from the constraints of public commissions.
Inspired by the spiritual and philosophical foundations of the Enlightenment, which promoted the ideals of reason, progress and freedom, Goya drew his subjects from the life of his time, focusing on the most provocative aspects of the social and political reality that surrounded him, in order to offer a merciless critique of the darker sides of Spanish society at the end of the 18th century.

Opening: Wednesday 22 January
Duration: January – September 2025

Curator: Katerina Tavantz

The Seduction of the Stranger – In-Between Space

A thematic tribute to Greek Art  

The impact of Goya’s subversive vision of the world has proven to be remarkably enduring. It made its presence felt in the liberating explosion of surrealist visions and the poetic language of modernism, while continuing to offer us a valuable reservoir of original visual interpretations of our relationship with the world and the beings that compose it. His engravings are distinguished by the verisimilitude of the monstrous, the persuasiveness of the absurd, and the allure of the hideous.

Utilizing the theatricality of the carnival tradition and the Commedia dell’ Arte, Goya composes a novel universe dominated by ambiguity and hybridity, the constant hovering between the familiar and the unfamiliar, a sensation that is due to the masterful combination of popular, everyday themes with incongruous, threatening, repulsive or even inexplicable forms that paradoxically attract us instead of repelling us, perhaps because in them we intuitively recognize something deeply our own.

Driven by the series of Goya’s engravings at the National Gallery and consistent with the intention of renewing the tools for reading historical collections with the program of activities of the Intermediate Space, we present, in parallel with the exhibition of the 80 engravings of the Los Caprichos series , a thematic tribute to Greek art entitled The Seduction of the Stranger . The group exhibition includes works by ten artists who, from different starting points, embrace and depict the strange, the hybrid, and the grotesque. 

Artists: Angelos Antonopoulos, Yannis Gaitis, Silia Daskopoulou, Marianna Ignataki, Dionysis Kavallieratos, Christoforos Katsadiotis, Tasos Mantzavinos, Malvina Panagiotidi, Angelos Papadimitriou, Philippos Tsitsopoulos

Opening: Wednesday, January 22
Duration: January – September 2025

Some information about the current exhibition “Democracy”

The timely exhibition DEMOCRACY will be completed on 2 February 2025. It is the first major international exhibition to explore the relationship between art and democracy during one of the most decisive periods in the history of Southern Europe, as three countries, Greece, Portugal and Spain, transitioned from an authoritarian regime to a democratic constitution.

The exhibition DEMOCRACY is an overall project involving over 55 artists and artist groups. It includes 140 artworks, from Greece, Spain and Portugal, as well as posters, video projections and performances.
Two performances will take place in January as part of the exhibition
See more about the exhibition and the list of artists here