“Blanc: Portrait of a Space in Transition”: A group exhibition – farewell to a former family bakery

Crux Gallery presents the group exhibition “Blanc: Portrait of a Space in Transition” in a former family bakery that now houses the studio of Anestis Ioannou. The exhibition is based on conversations between Ivan Argote and Ioannou during the EMST Mentorship Programme (2025) of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens. The programme aimed to foster long-term exchange and dialogue between emerging Greek artists and established international figures of the contemporary art scene.

The exhibition unfolds within the half-empty space of the family-run bakery, which recently closed. The conversations between the two artists began in this very space–now Ioannou’s studio–during this transitional period, eventually leading to the idea for the exhibition. The in-between state of the space, following the closure of a business that had belonged to Ioannou’s grandfather and father for forty-seven years, became the starting point. Participating artists are invited to engage with the former bakery precisely at this moment of transition, before its passage into something new and unknown.

The works touch upon themes such as survival and resilience, memory, coexistence with ourselves and our traumas, as well as identities shaped and reshaped through our relationships with others and with the spaces we inhabit. The exhibition is conceived as an ephemeral gesture, a farewell to the rapidly transforming landscape of a city increasingly shaped by uniformity, global trends, gentrification, and consumerism.