Sotiris Sorogas

The Time of Memory in His Artistic Language

22.12.2021 - 03.04.2022 (EXTENDED TO 17.04.2022)

The exhibition has been extended to Sunday April 17, 2022

The Museum of the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation in Athens is very happy to present, at its temporary exhibitions gallery, a tribute to distinguished Greek artist Sotiris Sorogas titled Sotiris Sorogas – The Time of Memory in His Artistic Language, from December 22, 2021 through April 3, 2022 (extended to April 17, 2022).

The exhibition features 28 large-sized works, showcased in five thematic units, which are part of the Foundation’s Collection and indicatively cover the main periods of the painter’s artistic journey.

The Openings, the black holes, the wells… appear to motivate the gaze to expect an implicit representation. Black seeks a way out towards the light. It is as if the artist wishes to express his concern over the state that painting has notably entered during his time.

With the sea wood and the caiques, the painter wishes to depict the image of sunken times and the material mortality that is inevitably brought about by the decay of time.

The Stones reflect human toil. He wants them to depict the patience of the “rock-strewn”, according to him, homeland, patiently awaiting the self-declared expectation of resurrection.

The Horses, in a Giacomettian existential angst, seem to wish to escape the loss of annihilation and emerge from the dominant white as if seeking a new beginning.

The Portraits, painted using mild chiaroscuro and a dense, repetitive visual writing, aim at transforming fractional time into a time of constant remembrance, highlighting the inner identity of the person portrayed.

With his personal painting codes and thematic units of his own conceptual coherence, what Sotiris Sorogas, without restricting himself to an ideological artistic dogmatism, put forward in his artistic endeavour, is to keep imminent loss alive. To give memory time, so that the definitive mortality of beings can be kept alive.

Wandering around the exhibition, visitors immediately experience the emotion that emerges from these wonderful paintings, which have deep roots in the tradition that the distinguished artist is constantly invoking and incorporating in his work.

With his modest colour range that is dominated by a dazzling white and black as well as his unparalleled drawing mastery - virtues that are accompanied by the intellect and the clarity of his equally simple yet substantial and gifted language - he places side by side convention and emotion, mind and feelings. Aware of the demands of our times, he suggests, without sensationalism and the emptiness of a superficial ideological rhetoric, an artistically comprehensive language.

Sotiris Sorogas was born in Athens in 1936. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts on a state scholarship, where he was taught by Yiannis Moralis, Pantelis Prevelakis and Pavlos Mylonas. In 1972 he received a personal scholarship from the Ford Foundation, which enabled him to travel to Europe and the United States. In 1964 he started to teach drawing at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), where he later became a professor. He was a founding member of the Association of Contemporary Art, a member of the Group for Art Communication and Education and a member of the Speira art journal editorial board.

In 2004 he was honoured by the Academy of Athens for his overall contribution to art and in 2010 six large compositions of his were placed at the Athens Metro Larissa Station. His works have been showcased in many solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, while he represented Greece at the Sao Paulo Biennial (1981) and at Europalia in Brussels (1982).