In Benaki Museum on Piraeus Street, the retrospective exhibition of the great Greek painter is exhibited from 20/09/2018 - 05/01/2019 Giannis Moralis, in the organization of which the Benaki Museum, the National Gallery-Museum of Alexandros Soutsos, the Educational Foundation of the National Bank and the Zoumboulaki Gallery collaborate for the first time. The exhibition includes representative works from all periods of the artist, numbering a total of 400 exhibits.

Ο Giannis Moralis (1916-2009) He was one of the most popular artistic figures of the Greek 20th century: a pioneering painter, a talented engraver, a gifted set designer and a prominent academic teacher for over thirty years. Through paintings, drawings and engravings, sculptures and architectural applications, album covers and book illustrations, the exhibition attempts to map the course of Giannis Moralis per creative decade, highlighting unknown aspects of his life and work.

Giannis Moralis was happy to meet him Giannis Tsarouchis and with him to be the two most popular painters of his time. Before the war he became a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Athens. In the beginning his works are classics, with references to the rigor of Ucelo's composition, to the subtlety and power of Raphael portraits and to the grace of Botticelli's figures.

Self-portrait with his classmate in Greece and his scholarship in Italy Nikos Nikolaou, in one of the works of the classical period. After the war, Giannis Moralis slowly abandons his classicism and moves to an abstraction, not in the sense of the disappearance of form, but by eliminating unnecessary details and simplifying the figure. Its protagonists are the female bodies.

The outline and the color have such a harmonious collaboration that they do not exist in any other modern Greek painter. The combination of color and design somehow nullifies the properties of both and recreates a new image with an inner strength.

An excellent documentary, which is shown in a sadly sad room - perhaps the only drawback of the otherwise perfect exhibition - reveals the life of the great teacher, as he humorously narrates the stages of his life, important but also simple everyday human events that describe his character and views on his painting and work.

The 60's find Giannis Moralis in a very productive phase. He creates book covers, collaborating with the publishing house Ikaros, where he creates books by Odysseas Elytis and Georgios Seferis, designs album covers by Mikis Thodorakis (Epitaph) and mainly by Manos Hadjidakis (Api , The surroundings etc) while he is staging in the Greek Dance Drama of Rallos Manos and in the Art Theater of Karolos Koun. A monumental work of his at the same time is the southwest side of the Hilton in Athens.

The two illustrated tables of the same period and the same subject depict in the best way, the change his style.

What is "missing" are landscapes that Moralis did not seem to like. The famous "Greek light", says the student of Mr. Makris, has been "assimilated" by the great painter.

«Moralis did not deal with the properties of light as other colleagues did. His first works are darker, he made many portraits, he did not go out, he has few landscapes. The light passes through a personal element of his work. He did not feel the need to face the light like other of his peers did. The light of Moralis does not shine, it is internal", He underlines.

In the last phase of his life, Giannis Moralis passes to the absolute abstraction. The protagonist is always the female body, which is now an off-white form.

An exhibition that fills you with the inner light of the artist's works and that at the same time, reveals to you great moments of the artistic life of the 20th century.