Vaso Katraki – Engravings

Grand Opening : October 9th, at 20.00

A retrospective exhibition featuring works from the Marianna Katraki family collection that showcases the engravings of Vaso Katraki stands as a reference point and one of the most comprehensive and fertile approaches in Greek art.

In her characteristic, elongated, archetypal figures, with their austerity and meticulously refined simplification of form, Vaso Katraki creates an entire universe of images. She shapes her vital relationship with the world, presents an attitude towards life and makes a social-political statement, focusing on the fate of humanity through the evocative contrast of black and white. Her transition from the traditional technique of woodcut to engraving on stone in a completely original manner not only granted her unprecedented expressive possibilities, a different scale of size, and a new sense of materiality, but it also significantly contributed to the renewal of the art of engraving, liberating it from all kinds of conventions and constraints.

Alongside her art, in direct interdependence with it, are her life, her origins, and her experiences: her birthplace, Aitoliko and its lagoon; the War and the Occupation, the Resistance and the Civil War, the Junta of the Colonels; her militant consciousness, her involvement with the Left; the adventures, persecutions, and exile; the resurgences, expectations, and disappointments. Vaso Katraki not only lived her era with intensity but also integrated this intensity into her creation. Her body of work, honored with international awards and distinctions, demonstrates unique consistency as well as the resilience and quality of her structural explorations and intellectual interests. Her compositions maintain their relevance, the impact, and the strength of their messages and symbols

The exhibition “Vaso Katraki-Engravings” compiles more than seventy works by the engraver, spanning her entire career: from her early woodcuts in the late 1930s to her compositions from the 1980s. The exhibition is accompanied by rich visual material, with particular emphasis placed on works created by the engraver during the period 1967-1974, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the restoration of democracy. Spontaneous and instinctive, dreamer, romantic and dynamic as a person, Vaso Katraki dedicated herself to her art, which affirms its authenticity and significance through its truth and boldness, balance, poetry, and sensitivity, its ethical values and humanitarian-universal content.

Free Entrance

Municipal Gallery of Thessaloniki – Casa Bianca
Queen Olga 182 and Them. Sofouli, 54646, Thessaloniki
Days & Hours of Operation: Tuesday-Friday: 10.00-18.00, Saturday: 10.00-16.00

Tel. 2313 318538, 2310 427555 | e-mail: pinakothiki@thessaloniki.gr