A retrospective of Greek artist Miltos Scouras, bringing together 165 works created between 1983 and 2026, opens October 22 at the Athens Municipal Gallery, tracing more than four decades of artistic exploration into the relationship between images and reality.
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Titled Between the Visible, the exhibition runs through November 22 and includes works shown to the public for the first time. Curated by art historian Giannis Bolis, with Eugenia Iskou as co-curator, the presentation examines Skouras’ evolving approach to painting, human presence and the shifting meanings of images.
B&W 22cmx22cm, by Miltos Scouras
Rather than presenting reality as something fixed, Scouras creates compositions that invite viewers to question what they see and consider what remains hidden. His paintings often appear suspended in time, poised between a story’s beginning and its end, or between the recognizable world and the realms of dreams and imagination.
“The compositions give the impression of being frozen in time, balanced on the threshold of a narrative, a story whose preceding events and future developments remain unknown,” Bolis writes. He describes the works as images of an intermediate world, situated between reality and dreams, truth and falsehood.
From international visual culture to painting
Scouras’ artistic language developed through an international career shaped by architecture, visual communication, graphic novels, fashion, advertising and popular culture.
After graduating from architecture school in Milan in 1979, he studied semiotics and communication at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. His experience in New York, along with his work for magazines and in graphic design, helped shape a visual vocabulary that draws on both commercial imagery and fine art.
In 1983, Scouras published his first work in the French comics magazine Métal Hurlant. Further publications followed in the American magazine Heavy Metal and the Italian magazine Alter. For more than a decade, he worked across Milan, Paris and New York, exploring the relationship between images and text while pursuing projects in graphic design, advertising and fashion.
This background forms a key part of the Athens retrospective. One gallery functions as a workshop of the artist’s visual thinking, bringing together early works, graphic novels, fashion-related material, magazine projects and the Mossaikon series to trace his transition from applied imagery to a form of painting that leaves room for narrative ambiguity.
As art historian Maria Tsantsanoglou observes, Skouras’ artistic trajectory emerged from an international, cosmopolitan experience of images before returning to Greece without losing its connection to that wider visual culture.
His technical precision, Tsantsanoglou argues, does not simply reproduce reality. Instead, it frequently challenges the illusion it creates.
Images that change as viewers look closer
Across the exhibition, Skouras repeatedly questions the stability of the image, using changes in scale, contrasts between color and black and white, and the interplay of painting and text to complicate the viewer’s first impression.
In Black & White Stories, his works initially evoke photographic realism. As viewers approach the canvases, however, the illusion gives way to visible paint, canvas and traces of the artistic process. The artist describes these works as “pictorial long takes,” combining images and text without allowing either to explain the other. Their narratives remain open to interpretation.
Artwork by Miltos Scouras.
The Border Line series pairs large black-and-white images with smaller color compositions, creating a visual space between the real and the imagined. The horizon becomes more than a division between sea and sky: it marks a boundary between different ways of interpreting an image.
A similar relationship between scale and meaning defines the Landscape series, where expansive color paintings interact with smaller black-and-white compositions. A detail in the smaller image, such as an object or a material remnant, can alter the meaning of the larger scene. Through these traces, human presence emerges even when no person appears.
Artwork by Miltos Scouras.
In Attimo Fuggente, or Fleeting Moment, Skouras takes a different approach. By blurring the human figure, he conveys the sense of a presence slipping away and a moment caught in transition.
Together, these series demonstrate how the artist moves beyond straightforward representation. His paintings offer images that seem familiar at first but reveal new possibilities when viewed more attentively.
What lies between the visible and the unseen
From his early illustrated narratives to his most recent paintings, Scouras returns to the same fundamental questions: how images relate to reality, how presence can be conveyed through absence, and how something initially recognizable can acquire a different meaning upon closer inspection.
Artwork by Miltos Scouras.
The retrospective brings these concerns together without reducing them to a single interpretation. Instead, it encourages viewers to reconsider the relationship between what a painting depicts and what it leaves unresolved.
As Bolis explains, Scouras seeks to render “what is absent in relation to what is depicted.”
Artwork by Miltos Scouras.
That tension lies at the heart of Between the Visible: the space between an image’s immediate recognition and the meanings that emerge when viewers take a second look.
The fully illustrated catalog, published by Nisos in Greek and English, features essays by Bolis, Tsantsanoglou, Koskina, Tasos Sakellaropoulos and Iskou.
Information
Venue: Athens Municipal Gallery, Leonidou and Myllerou streets, Metaxourgeio, Athens
Dates: October 22–November 22, 2026
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.; closed Monday
Admission: Free