50+1 Stories from the Costakis Collection

The exhibition “50+1 Stories from the Costakis Collection” is presented at Thessaloniki’s MOMus-Museum of Modern Art, in Moni Lazariston until Sunday 12 November 2023.


What common thread could be linking Rosa Luxemburg, Jackson Pollock, Vasily Kandinsky, Leon Trotsky, Oscar Wilde and Yoko Ono with visual artists active in early 20th century Russia, such as Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Solomon Nikitin and Vladimir Tatlin? How did an art exhibition that was held one hundred years ago instigate such heated confrontations between participating artists, and how did a rare edition end up printed in the form of a wallpaper? How did a work of art end up going through... an X-ray in a public hospital?

The answers to these and even more questions can be found in the 50 plus 1 stories developed in the homonymous exhibition. More than one hundred works of art and archival material from the Museum's renowned Costakis Collection will serve as the basis for the narratives and journeys presented to visitors, functioning in parallel and complementary to the stories that accompany them. Almost the entire line-up of artists included in the Costakis collection are represented in this exhibition, together with all the various art trends and groups from early 20th century Russian avant-garde, in an equal and complementary concurrence of artworks and texts. The narrative has a fairly anecdotal character and is enriched by the unabridged, original recollections of collector George Costakis, which function as the common thread.