OPENING NIGHT OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART GREECE (EMST)

Last autumn I attended the long awaited opening night of The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece (EMST), which is incidentally down the road from where I live.

The wait has come after years of delay which included the extortionately costly rebuilding of half of the former Sygrou Fix Beer Factory – I personally could not have disagreed more with the architectural decisions that were made. However, with that hang up aside, this was a momentously proud moment for Greece – we now have a Museum of Modern Art. We never had one until now..

On its opening night the museum unveiled a series of galleries, which only constitute a fraction of the overall building capacity – but it is a start. The collection was well displayed and curatored by any international museum standards, head curator Katerina Koskina did a great job. The collection itself has a mix of modern artists including many Greek artists of course. There may not be the big international names of modern masters you would see in modern art museums abroad, but there were some good pieces none-the-less.

A series of works on paper exploring a play on modular configurations juxtaposed with a textile similarly exploring the modular component of the stitch.