Alexis Akrithakis’s “A Line Like a Wave”

Alexis Akrithakis has always been something of a known unknown. That’s what makes his first major retrospective in Greece for thirty years feel like a revelation, even for those familiar with his practice, given the range of over 250 works that span his life. Largely self-taught, this singular character from Greece’s iconic postwar generation is best known for his distinctive “tsiki-tsiki” compositions, a term coined in the mid-1960s by his friend, writer Costas Taktsis, to describe the sound of pen on paper. A teenage regular at Athens’s literary cafes, who kept company with subversive artist-poets and philosophers including the avant-garde misfit Yorgos V. Makris and trailblazer Nanos Valaoritis, Akrithakis considered these drawings a form of automatic writing. Intuitive black lines built labyrinthine contours, color-blocked shapes, and amoebic curves on paper that preceded Ettore Sottsass’s “Bacterio” pattern (1978) by years.

Akrithakis soon expanded these fractals with psychedelic colors and a growing lexicon of symbols, including arrows, suns, trees, boats, eyes, and hearts. The largest color drawings included here are two tempera-and-ink-on-paper compositions from 1967: Luna Park, a burnt-orange plane through which a multicolored explosion of shapes abstract a funfair; and The Universe, whose densely patterned population of flora, bodies, vehicles, and structures rises up to a checkered sky. Both exude a contained yet unbridled intensity that appears benign, until closer inspection reveals details like a factory in flames. Amplifying that charge by loosening his kaleidoscopic camouflage is Four Versions of Fascism in Greece, with winged figures, bombs, and helicopters crossing a segmented color-blocked surface; and La Gréce Originale (both works 1967), a multicolor tsiki-tsiki witness account of the CIA-backed Regime of Colonels taking over Greece that year.

The artist’s anti-fascist, anti-imperialist position expanded after moving to Berlin in 1968. Carousel for the Children of Vietnam (1969), created from a cardboard drawing, is a devastating critique of the Vietnam War. While the oil-on-canvas Requiem for the four American students – Shot in Ohio on May 1970 was an immediate response to the violent state crackdown on anti-war protests at Kent State University in primary colors, with an abstracted figure bearing a peace sign on its face.

Notably, this exhibition’s focus on Akrithakis’s renowned early aesthetic amplifies his politics. Puppets (1970), ink-and-collage cutouts of twentieth-century figures including Hitler, Franco, and Nixon, announces a resolute anti-authoritarianism, as does The General (1970), a large cardboard figure with fascist symbols, including the swastika, and the logo of the banana imperialist Chiquita Brands International, stuck to its lapel.1 Co-curated by Alexios Papazacharias and Chloé Akrithaki, the artist’s daughter, this maneuver feels purposeful. In accordance with its title, “A Line Like a Wave,”2 the exhibition flows through a large ground-floor gallery like an uninterrupted curve, to illuminate a restless artistic evolution that exceeds the artist’s celebrated early works. Paintings on canvas track the distillation of his symbolic geometries into a confidently non-conformist minimalist grid. Among them is the orange and slate-blue Le Jugement premier – d'après un texte de S. Meimaris (1970). One of many homages to poets, its interlocking and isolated shapes recall The Glory of Letters (1971), a colored-pencil-on-paper taxonomy of a personal code: arrows, segmented curls, dissected circles and squares.

The suitcase emerges as a focal point: what the artist described as a representation of “the topography of life under an oppressive system but at the same time a code signal for hope.”3 Reflecting an existence between his homes of Athens and Berlin (until his permanent return to Greece in 1984), the suitcase appears in paintings and assemblages that embody a peripatetic drive for material experimentation and unfettered expression. From Eight suitcases with rubbish from a beach (1972), which encases detritus according to type (dolls, plastic bottles, and the like) within wooden suitcase frames (suggestive of cages) covered in iron lattices, to two untitled candy-colored canvases from 1973 that playfully depict a minimalist pair of suitcases morphing into cubist dinosaurs. The form seems to evolve into an icon-like home in Shrine (1974), a steel aquamarine proskinitaria (a miniature memorial resembling a chapel), containing a mini-shrine housing a red heart. That symbolic metamorphosis aligns with the valise-shaped frame of the small paper theaters Akrithakis constructed with his daughter, “Small Theatres (For Chloe)” (1974–76), while heralding the “Little Theater” acrylic paintings from 1991, of playhouses-cum-shrines cleanly expressed in graphic black lines on mint, periwinkle, and fuchsia grounds.

Home is where the heart is, as they say, and that love—for life, people, and play—defined Akrithakis. Take Bar (1981), a wooden drinking perch created for a 1981 exhibition in Athens, which captures the conviviality of Fofi’s, a celebrated restaurant founded by Akrithakis’s wife, Fotini Koutselini, in Berlin.4 Or the stunning kites he made in 1985 from earth-toned glossy paper, reed, and twine, summoning the tradition of communities gathering to picnic on Clean Monday, marking the first day of Lent in the Greek Orthodox calendar. These are installed next to drawings and messages addressed to loved ones, alongside paintings of flowers the artist created to commemorate those who took their own lives. One 1986 letter, in which he talks about drawing to live, love, and die, evokes this immortal line from his diaries: “I learned the words along with their actions.”

Akrithakis maintained that will to live his art to the end: a position recalling the indignant anti-fascism of his youth, which feels palpable in the work he created before his death in 1994. While spending time in a psychiatric hospital in 1993 to soothe his addiction-rattled health, all too often an expression of sociopolitical alienation, the artist created a notebook of sixty-one exuberant line drawings of his fellow patients. Every mark seems to empathize with an uncompromising incandescence: a freedom that refuses its containment.