Exhibitions
George Lappas, sculpture as a territory of light, memory and transformation
To mark the tenth anniversary of the death of George Lappas (1950–2016), the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMΣT) presents SPOTLIGHT: George Lappas. Art always begins with the word “supposing” , an exhibition curated by Daphne Vitali and open from June 11 to November 8, 2026. Part of the museum’s SPOTLIGHT program—designed to explore the work of artists in its collection—the exhibition offers a focused examination of one of the key figures in the transformation of Greek sculpture in recent decades.
Lappas's work was crucial in expanding the traditional boundaries of sculpture in Greece. Through both his artistic practice and his teaching at the Athens Academy of Fine Arts, he helped shift the classical notion of sculpture as figurative representation towards a more open, experimental, and conceptual approach, in which the work ceases to be merely an object and becomes also space, atmosphere, and experience.
The exhibition brings together pieces from the EMΣT collection along with loans from other institutions and private collections, and focuses on a particularly significant period in Lappas's career, between 1996 and 2004. During this time, Lappas developed some of his most emblematic works using electric light and photographic transparencies. His artistic research at this time was oriented towards an increasingly complex relationship between sculpture, photography, architecture, and perception, opening up new formal and conceptual possibilities for the medium.
The exhibition is divided into two main sections. The first features pioneering works from 2001, originating from his landmark exhibition at the Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens. These are three-dimensional reconstructions of objects created with Duratrans photographic film, works in which Lappas initiates an innovative dialogue between volume, image, lighting, and architectural space. The second section brings together pieces focused on the human figure and situated at the intersection of sculpture and installation, where the body appears as a fragile, displaced, or transforming presence. In both cases, the exhibition underscores a central idea in his work: metamorphosis, understood both as a formal procedure and a perceptual experience, intensified through the use of light.
George Lappas's work is characterized by a constant investigation into sculptural form as a kind of three-dimensional drawing in space, as well as by his interest in the tension between two-dimensionality and volume, between architectural space and illusory space. Throughout his career, he explored these questions through work that spanned diverse disciplines and materials: sculpture, photography, movement, light, and scale. His imagery drew on multiple cultural references—from ancient Egyptian art, classical Greece, and Mayan civilization to contemporary iconography and key episodes in recent political and social history—articulating a body of work permeated by polarities such as the personal and the collective, the private and the public, the local and the global, East and West.
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