Yanni Moralis (1916-2009), one of the most distinguished twentieth-century Greek artists, articulated his artistic discourse through a myriad of painted works, but also challenged himself creatively with various forays into the arts of engraving, set design and microsculpture, as well as various applications and architecture.

In February 2009 the artist bestowed on the Benaki Museum the preliminary drawings for the architecture compositions that he maintained at his studio (approximately 120 works).Yanni Moralis was well known and celebrated for his artistic interventions in the appearance of public buildings, first displayed in 1959 in his collaboration on the Athens Hilton Hotel. These marked an era and broadened the horizons of collaboration between architects and artists. Over the following thirty years he submitted proposals for hotels, banks, public buildings as well as private residences. As many of these structures have since been destroyed, and this particular donation to the Benaki Museum constitutes an archive that provides testimony of exceptional importance to those who study the artist’s oeuvre; particularly since the donation includes ideas for architectural compositions, which never came to fruition.
The exhibition can be considered to be the first complete presentation of the artist’s architectural creations.

Exhibition organizing: Fani-Maria Tsigakou Exhibition curation and design: Lili Pezanou