Public programming winter 2025

Publication
The George Economou Collection is delighted to announce the publication of Conversations Vol. I, a collection of public conversations that took place at the George Economou Collection, Athens in 2024.

Born out of the desire to engage wider audiences and provide a historical and cultural context to the exhibitions on view, these conversations foster an intellectual discourse on art and culture.

The publication includes contributions by Ann Demeester, director of Kunsthaus Zurich; Diedrich Diederichsen, author, academic and critic; Prof. Christiane Lange, director of Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; James Lingwood, independent curator and previously codirector of ArtAngel, London; Christin Müller, independent curator and writer, Jorge Ribalta, independent curator and researcher; Jeff Wall, artist.

Upcoming talks
On the occasion of the exhibition Dana Schutz: The Island, the public program of conversations this winter focuses on the resurgence of figurative painting and the space women artists have occupied in it, while it also explores the notion and evolution of the artist’s studio.

Program
The Sisters of the Brush
A conversation with Alison Gingeras
Saturday, February 1, 2025 at 7pm

Where Painting Happens
With Martin Gayford
Saturday, March 8, 2025 at 7pm

This conversation series is curated by Vassilios Doupas in collaboration with Skarlet Smatana, director of the George Economou Collection. RSVP essential due to limited capacity.

Notes to editors
Alison M. Gingeras is a curator and writer based in Warsaw and New York. She currently serves as guest curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, where she is preparing a transhistorical exhibition entitled The Woman Question: 1550–2025 in November 2025. Gingeras has served as curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and Palazzo Grassi as well as curating special exhibitions at Tate Modern, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Dallas Contemporary. Over the past 30 years, Gingeras has contributed writing to numerous publications, including Artforum, Tate Etc, Spike, and Mousse. Her most recent book Pictures Girls Make: Portraitures was published by DAP and Blum in 2024.

Martin Gayford is an art historian and art critic. He was art critic for the Spectator and subsequently for The Sunday Telegraph before becoming chief art critic for Bloomberg News until 2013. He is a prolific author whose books include The Yellow House (2005), Constable in Love (2009), Michelangelo: His Epic Life in (2013) and Rendez-vous with Art (2014, co-authored with Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) His book about posing for Lucian Freud, entitled Man with a Blue Scarf, appeared in 2010. A History of Pictures: From Cave to Computer Screen was also co-authored with David Hockney, with another collaboration with Hockney following in 2022, titled Spring Cannot be Cancelled. His most recent book, How Painting Happens (and why it matters), was published by Thames & Hudson in 2024.

Vassilios Doupas is a curator and writer. He curates the public program at the George Economou Collection, Athens, and contributes to various postgraduate programs in curating in the UK. From 2020 to 2022, he was deputy director at the Art Newspaper Greece. He earlier served as curator of programs at the Contemporary Art Society, London, where he organized a series of high-profile events, including the 2019 Frieze Curatorial Summit; a conference on public art at Tate Modern, London; and a conference on the new museum canon, in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has curated more than fifty exhibitions and projects and was cocurator of Queer Spaces: London, 1980s–Today at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019).