Art collection goes on display in Thessaloniki
Antonis and Azia Hadjioannou have deep faith in the quality of Greek painting and they have been collecting works for more than 30 years, building up an impressive private collection that was only made public a few years ago. Following an expansive first showing of their collection in 2007, the couple’s second exhibition is now on display at the Thessaloniki Municipal Cultural Center, located next to the Toumba soccer stadium, where it will remain until November 21. In contrast to the first show, in Hania, Crete, where the objective seemed to be to showcase the course of 20th-century Greek art, at the Thessaloniki exhibition there has been a more critical attitude in the selection of the works and in the setup, which focuses on highlighting modernist trends. The exhibition comprises 100 works of art from the 600-piece collection that have been either acquired or created within the last decade. When they first began collecting artworks 20 years ago, the couple focused on the masters of the older generation – such as Giorgos Gounaropoulos, Rallis Kopsidis and Chrysanthos Bostantzoglou – as well as top modernist names like Panayiotis Tetsis, Nikos Stefanou and Chronis Botsoglou. This past decade, the emphasis has been on figurative painters from the period between 1980 and 2000, such as Savvas Georgiadis, Daphne Angelidou, Sotiris Adrianos and Mantalina Psoma.
