Citronne Gallery presents the exhibition “Tassos Mantzavinos: Mnesipemona” at 16 Fokionos Negri. The title refers to Aeschylus and signifies the painful memory that pain and sore human experience can produce.

In Mantzavinos’s paintings and constructions Memory, personal and collective, dominates. It appears and is analyzed at times as a historical event, at others as a myth, yet at others as a bequeathed tradition. These discrete manifestations of memory are painted as representations of anniversaries, figures of myth, scenes from fairy tales, reconstructions of folk paintings and icons. The subject matter is historical events and folk narratives. Mantzavinos does not differentiate between myth, history or tradition: on the contrary, he combines and transforms events and legends, times and spaces. What attracts him is historical continuity as expressed in Byzantine iconography, popular art, Karaghiozis and Kontoglou.

His paintings have warriors in besieged castles, in fortified ships, soldiers, Aeneus with the statue of Artemis on his shoulders, Pegasus, the saint battling the dragon, the sirens. These figures from mythology or Christian tradition reflect good and evil as defined by imagination and the collective unconscious where the fear of death lies. The atmosphere is one of a continuous battle, an eternal war, palpable or metaphysical.

In this exhibition, are along the same lines, the lithographs-comments on the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe are presented for the first time.

Exhibition catalogue essays by:

• Tatiana Spinari-Pollali: Introduction to Mnesipemona
• Giorgos Prevelakis: Tassos Mantzavinos – A Political View
• Maria Maniadakis: The Raven – Edgar Allan Poe
• Dimitris Sotiropoulos: On the Dragons of the City: The Solitariness of Tassos Mantzavinos

Exhibition tour by Dr Tatiana Spinari-Pollali, art historian:

• Sunday 13th December at 13:00