Between Heaven and Earth

The first solo exhibition—and also the first retrospective—of Victoria Skarlatou’s work, titled “Between Heaven and Earth,” is on view at the Athens Municipal Art Gallery from October 22 through November 22, 2026, with the support of the Athens Municipality’s Organization for Culture, Sports, and Youth (OPANDA).

After more than sixty years of uninterrupted creative activity, Victoria Skarlatou’s work is being presented to the public for the first time as a unified artistic universe. The exhibition brings together 62 works from the 1960s to the present, tracking the evolution of a distinctive visual language that navigates between lived experience, memory, symbolism, and metaphysical inquiry.

A personal visual language that bridges the visible and the invisible

Victoria Skarlatou trained and worked at the Doxiadis Office in the late 1960s. Her painting begins with drawing and evolves through repetitive forms, symbols, words, and vivid colors. Her work draws on the familiar world—the body, family, human relationships, and the city—to gradually transform the everyday into a system of symbols.

Over the course of six decades, her forms have shifted from representation toward a world where bodies, objects, geometries, and invisible forces coexist. In her mature works, the natural world is deconstructed and reconstructed, while her painting gradually moves toward abstraction, geometry, and a more introspective exploration.

The title of the exhibition, “Between Heaven and Earth,” encapsulates the dual nature of her work: a style of painting deeply rooted in human experience and everyday life, yet at the same time oriented toward the spiritual, the unknown, and the transcendent.

An ext…

Source: https://cultureisathens.gr/en/event/between-heaven-and-earth