Softness and Strength. This week’s exhibition recommendations in Athens, 27.10-2.11

Published on: 26/10/2025

This week’s recommended exhibitions clearly showcase the voice of young contemporary art—bold, different, angry, and combative. Three shows, each in its own way, explore the challenges of life in the contemporary era, especially those faced by younger generations.

Moreover, all the artists featured this week work in a language of contemporary art that emphasizes its materiality, pushing boundaries, and combining elements drawn from the world of craft—both hard and soft.

Wishing you a wonderful week,
filled with powerful, inspiring art.
Shani Werner & the ATHENS ART TOURS Team

Gisela McDaniel solo exhibition Pineptran Istreyas & Akhinos
Dio Horia Gallery, Lempesi 5-7 & Porinou 16, 117 42 Athens
On view until: 29 November 2025

This April, the 61st Venice Biennale will open — the world’s most influential art event, setting the tone for contemporary art by highlighting the voices and ideas that shape today’s global scene. I’ve written before about the significance of this event and about how the 59th Biennale shaped the art world (you can read about that here). The previous edition in 2024 focused on androgyny, exile, migration, and other marginalized perspectives, creating ripples that still resonate across the art world.
Meanwhile in Athens, Dio Horia Gallery in Koukaki presents an outstanding solo exhibition by Gisela McDaniel, a diasporic Indigenous Chamorro artist from Guam. Living and creating outside her homeland, McDaniel explores identity, heritage, and healing through powerful, collaborative portraits of women and femme-identifying subjects.
Her paintings blend vivid color, sound, and found materials — shells, nets, jewelry — creating textured ecosystems that breathe with emotion and resilience. This show is a must-see for anyone who wants to experience one of the most exciting and relevant voices in contemporary art right now.
More info here

Georgia Lale solo exhibition “In This Sign Conquer”
a.antonopoulou.art, 20 Aristofanous Street, Psyrri, 4th floor, 105 54 Athens
On view until: 29 November 2025

Another artist who embodies some of the most compelling trends in contemporary art today is Georgia Lale. Lale is a non-binary artist whose work boldly confronts feminist issues and social injustice, challenging the conservative male-dominated structures that still shape Greek society.
Using used bedsheets donated by women and femme-identifying people in Greece—“slept on and filled with dreams of a safer, fairer world”—Lale creates powerful textile pieces. These intimate materials become visual acts of resistance.
At the center of their work appears Anna, a character taken from 1950s Greek schoolbooks. Removed from her innocent educational context, Anna is reimagined as she journeys through Western cultural history, embodying the roles forced onto women across myth, religion, and patriarchal narratives. Through Anna, Lale exposes the enduring violence and expectations imposed on the female body.
Their art is not only visual—it is activism stitched with memory and struggle.
More info here

Nikos Podias solo exhibition “Safe Area”
CITRONNE Gallery – 19 Patriarchou Ioakim
Athens
On view until: 3 January 2026
Maybe it’s a kind of privilege men have—the freedom to play with soft materials and shape them into something powerful and imposing. It’s a gesture I’m not sure a woman artist would make, or at least not in the same way. And perhaps that contrast is especially striking next to the two women artists discussed earlier.
Nikos Podias works with humble materials—paper, tea bags, organic fibers, plant fragments. His art is a meticulous craft, full of patience and precision. From fragile elements he builds works with surprising force, always balancing between delicacy and toughness.
His new exhibition features wall pieces and a suspended installation made entirely of golden paper. The works evoke thorn fields, protective armor, or ancient architectural relics—shapes that echo deep within our collective subconscious. Yet their vulnerability is ever-present: everything is built from paper, ready to collapse at a touch. This tension between strength and fragility makes the experience of the exhibition quietly compelling.
More info here