ON FEBRUARY 11, 2026, the Benaki Museum / Pireos 138, inaugurated the major retrospective exhibition “Alexis Akrithakis. A Line Like a Wave”. This incredible exhibition covers the entire creative career of the iconic artist. The exhibition is co-organized by the Benaki Museum and the Akrithakis Archive. It is curated by Chloe Akrithaki and Alexios Papazacharias and will run from February 12 to May 24, 2026.

At the same time, for the Benaki Museum, the exhibition marks the beginning of its partnership with Rolex as the “Official Watch of the Benaki Museum,” integrating it into the global network of leading cultural institutions supported by the Swiss brand.

The exhibition “Alexis Akrithakis. A Line Like a Wave” brings together more than 250 selected works from private and public collections, spanning all creative periods of the artist and presented chronologically. For the first time in a retrospective exhibition, his earliest works are on display, as well as those he completed shortly before his death.

The works featured in the exhibition present Alexis Akrithakis’s pictorial universe with his familiar motifs—such as eyes and hearts, arrows and bows, suitcases, little boats, waves, and others—while at the same time unfolding the adventure of painting, materials, and construction, and highlighting the unique sense of color that characterizes him.

Immediate, precise, and subversive, Alexis Akrithakis’s works constitute a distinctive case within the canon of modern Greek art. With his disarming sincerity and personal visual language, his structured approach to color, and his decisive choice of themes, Alexis Akrithakis succeeded—until his untimely death—in creating a body of work that is rich and heterogeneous, yet unmistakably recognizable.

The exhibition is structured around major thematic sections drawn from specific creative periods of the artist. The psychedelic tempera paintings of the 1960s, the intensely political works of the early 1970s, the Suitcase of the 1970s, the driftwood constructions and the lightbulb installations of the 1980s, the enlargements and repetitions of the 1990s, and his final, heartrending works featuring portraits of the mentally ill and the patients of “Dromokaiteio” Psychiatric Hospital form the core framework of the exhibition.

However, the presentation is further enriched by smaller groups of distinctive works that the artist himself had previously exhibited in separate shows, such as the kites, the circus series, the airplanes, the Flowers for the Suicides, and others that illuminate his multidimensional sensitivity toward reality and his critical stance against pomposity.

At the same time, and on the occasion of the exhibition, the publishing house Agra Editions is releasing the homonymous volume, edited by Chloe Akrithaki and Alexios Papazacharias and designed by Lila Palaiologou—an extensive and multilayered publishing project that documents the work and trajectory of one of the most emblematic artists of contemporary Greek art.

The 320-page volume, available in both Greek and English, constitutes an independent publishing endeavor that allows for an in-depth exploration of Alexis Akrithakis’s artistic practice and thought.

Alexis Akrithakis was born in Athens in 1939. From a young age, he associated with significant figures of the intellectual world, and his dialogue with them formed the core of his artistic education. He lived and worked in Paris (1958–1960) and in Berlin (1968–1984), where he settled with a DAAD scholarship. In 1984, he returned permanently to Greece.

His work spans painting, drawing, constructions, and artists’ books, while his explosive creativity was also expressed through furniture design and stage set design. After his death in 1994, his work was presented in major retrospective exhibitions: in 1997–1998 at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki and at the National Gallery in Athens, as well as in 2003 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. More recently, in 2018, the exhibition “The Stories of Alexis Akrithakis” was presented at the City of Athens Arts Center (Eleftherias Park), and in 2019 the exhibition “tsiki-tsiki” was organized at the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture.

Educational events and tours have also been organized. For more info, go to the Benaki Pireos site here.