A few words about the exhibition

The works of Theodoros Stamos and Christos Capralos that are exhibited in the Basilica of St. Mark and Loggia under the auspices of the municipality of Iraklion come from the collection of Zacharias Portalakis. In terms of volume and quality, they are two important nuclei of this collection, which consists of a big number of works from both Greek and foreign painters, as well as a sizeable sample of Greek - war sculpture.

The concurrent presentation of a painter and a sculptor in two historic places of the city of Iraklion will give the opportunity to the public to become acquainted with two "manual labourers" of colour and volume, the first one a Greek immigrant successful in America, and the second one promoting sculpture in Greece. Through the dialectic that is allowed by the co-presentation of two different representatives of post - war modernism, the visitors of the exhibition will be able to authenticate the profound esteem that both artists felt for each other after their meeting at the end of their lives.

Forty-three paintings by Theodoros Stamos, one of the most important representatives of American abstract expressionism, are presented in the Basilica of St. Mark. The exhibition has a kind of a retrospective character and covers a wide time span (from 1945 until 1993), thus presenting representative samples of the creative path of the artist, from the first biomorphic and abstract works of the 1940s and 1950s until the infinity colour fields of the last twenty years.

Seventeen sculptures and sculptural compositions of Christos Capralos in bronze are exhibited in the Loggia, made between 1950 and 1989 and most of them cast shortly before the death of the artist. Through this mostly anthropocentric ensemble, the gradual displacement of the artist from monumental realism in 1950 to the abstract - and dramatic - sculpture of the following decades.

Anna Kafetsi

With the kind support of
Zacharias G. Portalakis S.A. Brokerage Firm