MYRTO XANTHOPOULOU – ETERNAL FAN | ΤHE ART ATHINA 2025 YOUNG ARTIST AWARD

A familiar yet peculiar hum fills the MOMUS-Alex Mylona Museum in Thissio, Athens, as words and materials, memories and dreams swirl through the space. eternal fan, an exhibition by Myrto Xanthopoulou, winner of the Art Athina 2025 Young Artist Award, will be presented in the museum’s temporary exhibition space from 10 September to 25 October 2026.

Language, as both a means and a tool of expression, lies at the heart of Xanthopoulou’s artistic enquiry and experimentation. Her interest in language stems in part from her own bilingual background. She builds an idiosyncratic archive of words and phrases, improvised poems and fragmented sentences that evoke imagined everyday conversations or elliptical inner monologues, while remaining fascinated by misunderstandings of meaning, puns and wordplay.

At the same time, she systematically collects disposable and construction materials, different types of paper, which she alters using glue, acrylics and spray paint, as well as single-use objects gathered from the city, her home and her studio. Together with language, these used and discarded materials of everyday life become the primary building blocks of her compositions, created through a painstaking and time-consuming manual process that always demands her direct physical involvement.

Drawings, installations and constructions on a medium and large scale come together to form a single visual environment. The works seem almost unable to support themselves, and therein lies their strength: the need to remain standing, even within a state of instability and uncertainty.

The exhibition is presented as part of the ongoing partnership between the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki – MOMUS, the Hellenic Art Galleries Association and Art Athina for the Young Artist Award, an initiative dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of emerging contemporary artists.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, with the support of Art Athina.

Curator: Yannis Bolis, Art Historian, Head of the Department of Contemporary Sculpture, MOMUS-Alex Mylona Museum.

The Art Athina 2025 Young Artist Award

Myrto Xanthopoulou, represented by Citronne Gallery, is the winner of the Art Athina 2025 Young Artist Award.

Established by the art fair in 2022 in partnership with MOMUS, the award aims to support contemporary artistic practice. Artists aged up to 45 who live and work in Greece are eligible for nomination by the gallery representing them, where they must have held at least one solo exhibition.

Following the assessment of 14 nominations submitted by participating galleries, Xanthopoulou’s work was selected unanimously by the Evaluation Committee for the 2025 award.

As the committee noted:

Her practice has developed with consistency and coherence and is distinguished by the breadth and diversity of the media she employs, including installations, constructions, drawings, video and performance. With an approach that is at once reflective and melancholic or playful, she creates environments through small gestures, overturning and transforming the givens of reality.

The Art Athina 2026 Young Artist Award will be announced at a special event during this year’s edition of the fair, taking place from 12 to 16 November 2026 at Onassis Ready.

Myrto Xanthopoulou – eternal fan
MOMUS-Alex Mylona Museum
10 September – 25 October 2026