The solo exhibition The Drawing Project – Works On Paper – Complete Series by painter Nikos Kiriakopoulos opens on Wednesday 7 December 2022 at 18.00 – 21.00 at the art space 16 Fokionos Negri.

Approximately four hundred works, a harvest of the artist’s work over the last three years, are presented in the form of an installation that resembles a giant sketchbook. The common axis of the exhibited works is none other than drawing as an independent means of expression. Kiriakopoulos consciously chooses the simplest of materials, pencils, inks, oil pastels and the surface of paper, proposing painterly images that are simple and unadorned, staying away from any kind of calological display.
His world, chaotic, orgiastic, erotic and mischievous but above all deeply human. Great painters from the history of art coexist in his work, with Lautrec’s figure dominating, couples courting, conquistadors, centaurs, bathers, patrons of American dive bars, Don Quixote.

Art Historian George Mylonas, among others, writes about his work:

“Nikos Kiriakopoulos’ figures have a vividness, an immediacy of feeling, they maintain a human emotion that is the thematic core of the exhibition. Especially in the works where the painter is depicted in front of the model, he transcribes his own psychic mood; a wink to the history of art, where the creator and the object of desire are grafted with a deep human emotion that can be compared to erotic passion. N.K.’s world is a real world, even when going back in time, flesh and blood. It does not know the luxury of loneliness, but neither does it know the empty hours of boredom and reverie. His world is the one we know on the beach in the morning, in the bar at night, a world in community.
His composition, his color, his figure, is sensation, just as it is this immediacy of feeling that distinguishes his paintings. N.K. has this special quality: he makes genuine paintings that move you simply and effortlessly, without requiring complex initiation degrees. Everyone will find something of their own in there, depending on their attitude towards life and their performances. But he will definitely find something. And this is a great fortune for the artist, but also for the advancement of painting in the country as a whole.”