elc team
Play lies at the very core of human experience. From the earliest years of life, it functions as a means of exploration, learning, and imagination. Through play, the world is organized, roles are tested, rules are shaped, and stories are born. This enduring and active presence of play in life and thought is brought to the forefront by the group exhibition PLAYROOM, presented at Imagine Visual Arts in Paiania.
The exhibition opens on Friday, December 19, 2025, from 18:00 to 22:00, and will run until January 18, 2026. Curated by art historian Eleni Gatsa, the exhibition brings together ten contemporary Greek artists in a shared visual field, where play serves as the central axis of narration and creation.
The exhibition draws on memories of childhood experience, theories of play, and the contemporary materiality of art. Painting, sculpture, constructions, textiles, and mixed media form a unified environment in which imagination is activated as a tool for understanding the world. The exhibition space is transformed into a meeting ground of images, objects, and narratives: cities made of toys and everyday materials, mechanisms that evoke processes of assembly, bodies in motion, and figures drawn from the world of fairy tales.
The participating artists-Vangelis Theodoridis, Nikos Iosif, Theofilos Katsipanos, Fotios Balas, Ismini Bonatsou, Smaragda Papoulia, Vasilis Soulis, Maira Stefou, Panagiotis Tanimanidis, and Marios Fournaris– come from different generations and work across diverse media. Their works engage in dialogue through shared motifs, gestures, and materials, forming a cohesive visual whole that unfolds around the concept of play.
PLAYROOM proposes a reading of play as an active artistic process. Play emerges as a way of organizing the image, as a method of construction, and as a starting point for storytelling. Imagination functions here as a fundamental tool, allowing the works to shape contemporary visual narratives with clarity, precision, and conceptual depth.
The exhibition is addressed to those who remember what it was like to play, to those who still play, and to those who seek works that engage with the present without losing touch with the child we all carry within us.
About Imagine Visual Arts
Imagine Visual Arts is an active space for creativity and experimentation, dedicated to showcasing artists working across all media of the visual arts. Through collaborations with artists and venues at both national and international levels, it promotes exhibitions distinguished by their quality and their thoughtful, meaningful approach to art.
