24 June – 11 October 2025

On Tuesday 24 June 2025, at 8 p.m., the exhibition of painting entitled ‘Giorgos Taxidis. Mount Athos: Land of Silence’ will be officially opened in the exhibition space of the Mount Athos Center.
 

This new exhibition is the result of a long-lasting visual arts programme organised by the Mount Athos Center in collaboration with the artist Giorgos Taxidis. During the period 2020-2025, the artist, with the Center’s support and guidance, made over fifteen journeys to the Athonite State. He visited all twenty of the monasteries, followed the daily programme of the monks, joined in their acts of worship, conversed with them, and recorded these experiences in 115 artworks – using a variety of media, including pencil, charcoal, oil and watercolour – as well as in a number of sculptures and prints.

The visual arts programme was supervised by the director of the Mount Athos Center, Anastasios Douros, while the exhibition was curated by the art historian Giannis Bolis, who, amongst other things, states the following about Taxidis’s works:
There is always little difference between emotion and experience in any encounter with a holy place, a world of silence, a world where everything is bound together in an inextricable web. A world where the light always enters from outside, from above, and penetrates our reality through small windows, half-open doors, narrow corridors. A world of undying and life-giving light, of pure, bountiful, spiritual and heavenly light. The images depicted by Giorgos Taxidis open themselves to this world of silence and light, evoke a deeper and more substantial form of communication, through the values of the painting art, through the clear gaze of a painter with a humble and unadulterated perception of the world, a perception that shows things as they are – or, as they should be: divine in their simplicity.           

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In conjunction with the exhibition, a catalogue bearing the same title has been released that includes all of Giorgos Taxidis’s works, together with texts by the curator Giannis Bolis and David Ebony, a former managing editor of the Art in America magazine and a contributing editor of many leading American art journals. Amongst other things, David Ebony notes that: The artist recorded his experiences in visual art, producing more than one hundred drawings, watercolors and paintings, over the course of the project. He also kept a journal in which he vividly recounts the physical environment as well as the personal impressions and psychological impact that this holy place had on him…  In many ways that parallel those of the monks, the life of an artist is a solitary one; and in the environment of Mount Athos, Taxidis was often alone. During the time of the pandemic, the monasteries were exceptionally quiet, meditative spaces. For that reason, the artist entitled this exhibition ‘Mount Athos: A Land of Silence’.

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Throughout the duration of the programme Giorgos Taxidis kept a journal, which is included in the exhibition catalogue. In this journal he recorded his personal experiences:  
(On Mount Athos) I would let myself take in what I was seeing, without being under any pressure to paint what I had already previously mastered. I came into conflict with my own artistic work in order to create something new, something I’d never painted before. It occurred to me that, in a way, despite the differences between them, monks and artists travel the same path in life: all that inner struggle, that lifetime’s purpose, that dedication and devotion to one’s work. Being patient and praying in one’s own individual way. Above all, accomplishing a work in the most authentic way. ‘We too seek the “true light”.’
(Journal entry for 4 June 2021)

 

Ο ζωγράφος Γιώργος Ταξίδης πεζοπορεί σε μονοπάτι του Αγίου Όρους

Giorgos Taxidis was born in 1987 and from 2010 to 2015 studied in the Department of Visual and Applied Arts in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s School of Fine Arts, where he graduated with honours. Through the Erasmus programme (2013-2014), he studied at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Madrid (UCM, Facultad de Bellas Artes). Later (2017-2019), on a scholarship, he undertook postgraduate studies at the New York Academy of Art. He has received a total of 12 scholarships (from the Fulbright Foundation, the NEON Organisation and the Georgios Varkas Legacy, among others). In 2012 he received a commendation from the Hellenic Post Office for a series of stamps entitled Europa 2012, and in 2014 won first prize in the Art and the City 5 competition in Athens. In 2018 his work was selected for the XL Catlin Art Prize competition, and in 2019 was awarded a prize by the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York. That year he taught drawing at the San Domenico School of Fine Arts. He designed the Cyclops Award for the urban non-profit association Cyclops based in Drama. He has presented six one-man shows and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Greece and other countries. Works of his are to be found in private collections both in Greece and abroad.

 

Alongside the arts programme, a documentary was made of the artist’s visits to Mount Athos, directed and edited by Nikos Anagnostopoulos, which will be screened at the exhibition.           

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Programme supervisor: Anastasios Douros

Exhibition curator: Giannis Bolis, art historian

Exhibition venue: Mount Athos Center (Nedelkos Building), 109 Egnatia St., Thessaloniki 546 35;  tel. 2310263308

Duration of exhibition: 24 June – 11 October 2025

Opening hours: Monday & Wednesday 09.00–16.00 / Tuesday, Thursday & Friday 09.00–20.00 / Saturday 09.00–15:00 / Closed on Sunday

Opening hours 28 July – 16 August 2025: Monday – Friday: 09.00–16.00 (Saturday & Sunday: closed)

During the exhibition guided tours are available for school and university students and other organised groups. For further information please call 2310263308.

Free admission