The title of this mini-survey of modern and contemporary Greek art includes a kind of trans-lingual pun: a word which is pronounced (and written here) as the English word ‘dirty’ but which means worry or trouble – a rather appropriate concept, perhaps, following the disastrous recent auctions of Greek art in London, not to mention the general state of Greece’s own economy. As for modern Greek art as an identifiable cultural, rather than commercial, category – well, that’s a more problematic idea, especially given the proportion of artists exhibited here who were/are actually based abroad.
The ironies of Greek identity are, certainly, one of the main themes here. Several works refer to the history of Greek art and culture – from Nanos Valaoritis reimagining the Greek myths with his surrealist collages from the 1960s, through Stelios Faitakis’s street art-derived combinations of sci-fi imagery with Byzantine motifs, to the aggressive iconoclasm of Dionysis Kavalliertos’s muddled wooden sign, ‘Oedipus!!! Did You Kill Your Mother And Fuck Your Father Again?’. Yet amid such brash, ostentatious amusements, it’s the more considered, ambivalent works that tend to stand out: Rallou Panagiotou’s dyptich, for instance, where a kitsch swimsuit pattern has been traced and carved into marble – or, conceivably, vice versa.
At the same time, the exhibition also has designs to offer a more straightforward, historical perspective. Modernist architectural designs, Arte Povera masterpieces, and contemporary rising stars (Athanasios Argianas’s tear-tracks rendered in metal are particularly elegant) are all covered, yet various expected names are omitted – no Takis or Jannis Kounellis, for example; not that there’d be room to physically squeeze anything else in here. As a result, and despite some genuinely fascinating individual pieces, the show as a whole feels slightly incoherent and contradictory – not really dirty, particularly, so much as messy.