Victoria Skarlatou: Between Heaven and Earth

Between Heaven and Earth, the first solo exhibition and retrospective of Victoria Skarlatou’s work, will be held at the City of Athens Art Gallery from October 22 to November 22, 2026.

After more than sixty years of continuous artistic creation, Skarlatou’s work will be presented publicly for the first time as a unified artistic universe. Bringing together sixty-one works from the 1960s to the present day, the exhibition traces the evolution of a highly distinctive visual language that moves between everyday experience, personal memory, social observation, and metaphysical inquiry.

The artist describes herself as a “draughtswoman.” She trained and worked at the Doxiadis Office in the late 1960s, and this background remains central to the way she constructs her images. For decades, she has been creating a repertoire of drawings depicting bodies, faces, hands, objects, words, symbols, and geometric forms. Skarlatou selects, transfers, enlarges, and combines these elements until the narrative of each work takes shape. Flat, vivid colours, strong outlines, frontal figures, and symbolic compositions create an instantly recognisable language.

The journey through the exhibition begins with the intimate world: the female body, the self, family, friends, partners, and human relationships. Gradually, people become characters, characters become types, and types become symbols. As the exhibition unfolds across the rooms, the narrative opens out onto the city, society, and political reality. The urban landscape, chaotic and complex, appears bright yet bleak and unsettling, bringing dark figures, archetypes, and behaviours to the fore. Along the way, it becomes apparent that the artist is seeking to construct her own narrative of the world around her. The natural world is dismantled and reassembled through bodies, networks, threads, spirits, and invisible forces. In the final section of the exhibition, the body recedes, and the work moves towards geometry and abstraction: all that remains are lines, passages, colours, and gates leading to something beyond the immediately visible reality.

The exhibition is curated by visual artist and researcher Kosmas Nikolaou and is the result of an extensive process of archiving, and documenting approximately 180 paintings, as well as drawings, notes, and written and oral accounts. The research was undertaken by the Office for Archival Development, an initiative founded by Kosmas Nikolaou to bring artistic archives and collections that have remained out of public view to wider attention.

The title Between Heaven and Earth encapsulates this journey: a body of work that is earthly, human, and often humorous, yet also spiritual, otherworldly, and transcendent. A painting practice that begins with what surrounds us and seeks to give form to what we cannot yet see.

The exhibition is supported by the City of Athens Culture, Sports and Youth Organization (OPANDA).