“Chloe Akrithaki. Encounters”: Portraying the Artists’ Mindscape

Snapshots from Chloe Akrithaki’s meetings with visual artists in their studios and outside

The Benaki Museum presents the exhibition “Chloe Akrithaki. Encounters” presenting snapshots from Chloe Akrithaki’s meetings with visual artists in their studios and outside, but always in places that are familiar to them.

In 1992, Chloe Akrithaki photographed her artist father Alexis Akrithakis (1939-1994) in his studio. This was her first artist photo shoot, while she was creating, feeling free, forgetting the existence of the camera. But this was also the experience that shaped her path and defined her relationship with the artists she would go on to photograph years later in Athens.

As curator Katerina Koskina points out, “Chloe Akrithaki’s Encounters is a work in progress, which is primarily about the mutual trust, acceptance and freedom between creators. It is a photographic rendering of the shared energy, atmosphere, and tangible surroundings of each encounter—its very pulse. Shaped gradually over time, it unfolds through a series of meetings with artists, enriched by other works, ideas, concerns, spaces, and techniques. Evolving like a living organism, it absorbs and transforms with each new interaction.And it is reflected and ultimately presented as a selection of other works, its own, as varied as the artists and the pulse of each encounter, and as varied as their works and their reasons for creating them.

The only constant is Chloe Akrithaki’s desire to offer the viewer images that are true and meaningful. Images that are rare, imbued with the naturalness of friendly communication, the joy of creation and the magnificence of a small, insignificant detail. In them, the immortalization of the artist “competes” in importance with the objects and architectural elements of the space, a movement, an expression, an uncontrolled shade of light, a detail, an unexpected change, generally things we consider insignificant, while contributing to the creation of a favorable climate for the creation of a work of art and the warmth of a friendly encounter. In fact, these are not portraits of artists or photographs of workshops, but an ongoing project by Chloe Akrithaki, which aims to portray the emotional, mental, practical and spatial state that artists experience when working on and creating their works“.

Chloe herself mentions about the meetings with the artists: “It’s a personal approach, a visit to a friend. We drink coffee, tea, sometimes a beer and talk about art, about what it’s like to be an artist today, especially in Greece. In some of my photographs, the studio environment and details or individual body parts become portraits. And sometimes it happens that knowing me well, at a certain peak of trust and duty, they forget me. Then I can get candid snapshots that show them focusing on the artistic creation.”

Chloe Akrithaki met the artists:

Demosthenes Avramidis, Yannis Adamakos, Christos Athanasiadis, Eugenia Apostolou, Amalia Vekri, Kostis Velonis, Vassilis Gerodimos, Dimitris Georgakopoulos, Vaso Gavaise, Marianna Gioca, Martha Dimitropoulou, Katerina Zacharopoulou, Athena Ioannou, Dionysis Kavallieratos, Lisi Kalliga, Irini Karagiannopoulou, Apostolis Karakatsanis, Nikomachi Karakostanoglou, Michalis Katzourakis, Katerina Katsifarakis, Peggy Kliafa, Panagiotis Koulouras, Alexandros Laios, Panagiotis Leje, Vasiliki Lefkaditis, Marianna Lourba, Miltos Manetas, Irini Miga, Maro Michalakakou, Kyriakos Mortarakos, Cleopatra Mursela, Christos Bouronikos, Eleni Mylonas, Euphrosini Mytilinaiou, Antonis Donev, Nikos Papadimitriou, Nikos Papadopoulos, Alexios Papazacharias, Ilias Papailakis, Nikos Podias, Lila Polenakis, Spyridoula Politis, Georgia Sagris, Nana Sahini, Kostas Sahpazis, George Stamatakis, Sophia Stevi, Chrysanthos Sotiropoulos, Tolis Tatolas, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Alexandros Tzanis, Thanasis Totsikas, Nikos Tranos, Giorgos Cherionis, Filippos Tsitsopoulos, Kostas Tsolis, Maro Fasouli, Effie Haliori, Dionysis Christofilogiannis, Mandalina Psoma, Capten, Paolo Colombo.

Short Biography of the artist

Chloe Akrithaki is an artist whose main medium is photography. She was born in 1969 in West Berlin. Daughter of the painter Alexis Akrithakis and the cosmopolitan Phofe, she grew up among artists between Athens and Berlin. She studied photography, design and new media at the Bildo Academy of Art and Media in Berlin. She lives and works in Prague and Athens.

Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Since 2016, she has been responsible for the management and promotion of her father’s work and her mother’s archive through the organization of exhibitions and the production of publications.