“Inside the Workshop of Christophoros Katsadiotis”: A monumental studio at the Benaki Museum where printmaking meets the poetry of remnants

Christophoros Katsadiotis has created a monumental workshop — a hybrid space where the art of printmaking is pushed to new frontiers. Here, the work of the printmaker is not simply displayed; it is unveiled.

Dividing his time between Paris and Athens, Katsadiotis prepares his printing plates in France and completes each print by hand in his Athenian studio. Among presses, old radios, and scattered papers, enigmatic figures emerge. Zoomorphic, contorted faces — like characters drawn from a dark fairy tale or a shadowy allegory. They hold no trace of heroism, nor do they seek redemption. They are the “stateless” of daily life — faces of wear and ruin, excess and erosion. And yet, within them, Katsadiotis perceives a “rage for life.” A raw tension between beauty and suffering. These are the unsung protagonists of survival — those who endure without ever belonging.

The exhibition at the Benaki Museum / Pireos 138 is an immersive journey into the inner mechanics of Katsadiotis’ artistic language. As part of the exhibition, eight printmaking animations are presented, including one in 360-degree projection. Alongside them, the artist exhibits prints and oxidized metal printing plates. A central place is held by a monumental installation conceived specifically for the exhibition space: an idiosyncratic visual carousel composed of poems, torn pages from books, photographs of artworks by other artists from diverse movements, scraps of paper, broken toys, and discarded materials — plastics washed ashore, trash collected in Paris and Athens.

This immersive environment forms a poetic assemblage of remnants — a spatial narrative that dissolves the boundaries between the personal and the collective, the old and the new, the beautiful and the rejected.

Katsadiotis’ prints are accompanied by the very elements that shape his world: handwritten notes, found objects, torn photographs, newspaper clippings — fragments salvaged from the urban detritus. These city-born “parasites” are transformed into works of printmaking. Video and sound enrich the installation, creating an experience that is not only visual but fully audiovisual.

In this deeply personal cabinet de curiosités, animation becomes an extension of the printmaking process — granting movement to the static, giving voice to silence. At the Benaki Museum, Katsadiotis’ works acquire a presence of their own, like scenes from an underground film. They do not imply; they reveal.