Seventy works kept for decades in the studio of painter Jannis Psychopedis form the core of a new retrospective at the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation Museum in Athens, tracing the artist’s journey from 1962 to the present. Titled 'Jannis Psychopedis: Landscapes of Memory. The Ones I Kept,' the exhibition gathers paintings and mixed-media works that rarely appeared in public and were never intended as an archive. Psychopedis said he always saved 'two or three works from every period,' preserving them as 'support for the next movement' and as a record of life, art and experience. Emerging during the liberal climate of the 1960s, the artist belonged to the pioneering New Greek Realists and painted the tensions of a society shaped by advertising, consumerism and political upheaval.
The exhibition matters because it offers an unusually intimate view of an artist's personal selection process, revealing the works he considered essential to his own creative evolution. By presenting pieces that were never meant for public display, the show challenges conventional retrospective narratives and provides rare insight into how an artist curates his own legacy. It also highlights the enduring relevance of Psychopedis's social commentary, connecting classical antiquity with contemporary contradictions in works like 'Olympia' and 'The End of the Fairy Tale.'