23 March 2012 – 31 May 2013
Friday: 13:00-21:00,
Saturday-Sunday: 11:00-19:00,
Monday-Thursday: closed
From 23 March 2012, the Herakleidon Museum presents an exhibition of selected works from its collections by the artists M.C. Escher and V. Vasarely. The exhibition has no closing date, but the works will be rotated periodically.
The works have been selected around the theme of “Art and Mathematics”, a “gateway” that the Herakleidon Museum opened when it was founded in 2004, and which it now keeps wide open both to the general public and to the educational community. The founders, Pavlos and Belinda Firos, have in any case already announced their decision to focus the museum’s attention on learning and education, through a fruitful dialogue between the arts and the sciences that will showcase the artistic and scientific potential of our country and broaden the intellectual horizons of the public.
The first floor of the museum is devoted to the Hungarian-born French painter Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), the undisputed leader of Op Art.
Twenty-five screenprints are on show. The artist believed in what he called “social art”, as he did not want art to be the privilege of the “elite” alone.
In his writings he often declared his faith in making art widely available and in the value of multiples: I dream of a social art. I imagine people having a deep desire for the visual arts, just as they do for music.
Of the content of his art, he said: I did not experience the true revelation of the “abstract” until 1947, when I realized that pure “form-colour” can stand for the world (…) a plastic unity in a square or rectangular plane, containing forms of geometric origin, in colours or in contrasts. (…)”.
The second floor of the museum is devoted to the Dutch printmaker and graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), with about forty prints from the museum’s collection.
Escher himself considered himself a graphic artist, heart and soul, and left it to scientists to interpret his work in mathematical terms. From the 1950s he gained supporters among mathematicians and other scientists, whose interest his art had aroused.
To this day, his work remains a symbolic bridge between science and art.
All M.C. Escher works © The M.C. Escher Company B.V. – Baarn – the NETHERLANDS
The Herakleidon Museum invites art lovers to step through the “gateway” it has opened and enjoy a fascinating journey from the Aesthetics of Art to the Logic of Mathematics.
Herakleidon Museum
16 Herakleidon Street, Thiseio
