SKOUFA GALLERY is delighted to present the solo exhibition of Tasos Mantzavinos, titled “Pará thin’ halós” (“By the Seashore”). The exhibition opens on Thursday, January 15, 2026, at 7:30 p.m. and will run through February 7, 2026.

Tasos Mantzavinos returns to the shoreline of Faliro, where he was born. This is not a place of memory in the narrow, biographical sense, but an inner landscape that has never ceased to shape him. There, beside the water in his early years, the gaze learns to measure time differently—through rhythms and repetitions—until the sea becomes a sensation. The painter’s personal history is silently inscribed in this relationship. His father, a sailor, was lost early on, and his absence functions as a constant void. The sea ceases to be an external element; over the years it floods the artist and becomes a pictorial condition.

Mantzavinos’ now-familiar figures—sailors, boatmen, bodies in caiques, women who wait, winds that favor or drive away—compose a watery universe, within which they stand in the water as one stands before something that surpasses him. From Homer he draws the sense of the threshold: parà thîn’ halós (by the seashore) as the point where action is suspended and fate weighs heavily. From folk tradition and Karagiozis he retains the handmade form, a simplicity that withstands roughness, a childlike quality not as style but as a way of being.

Skoufa Gallery “lets in” the visitor to the world of Tasos Mantzavinos by bringing inside it a corner of the artist’s studio. Photographs, objects, and the master painter’s tools carry the visitor through time to where Mantzavinos opens himself to his dark sea. The works coexist as if still in the process of becoming, preserving something of the immediacy of creation.

The exhibition is curated by Giorgos Mylonas.

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SKOUFA GALLERY
4 Skoufa Street, Kolonaki, 10673
Tel. +30 210 3643025, +30 210 3603541

Opening hours:
Mon–Wed–Sat: 10:00–15:30
Tue–Thu: 10:00–15:30 & 17:30–21:00
Fri: 10:00–15:30 & 17:30–20:00

Email: info@skoufagallery.gr
Website: www.skoufagallery.gr