The Art of Book

What happens when the canvas and the palette make way for the printed page?

The Graphic Design Studio is set on gathering whatever it has: ideas, words, images, pages, books. Teachers, students and fellows, working together on a large-scale book/installation running through the rooms of the Stathatos Mansion. The book’s pages create an environment and form an exciting route the viewer is invited to follow.

The exhibits include a selection of artist’s books by students of the Studio —the result of searching and researching over the past decade. Imaginative and experimental, the books combine image and text with typesetting and printing methods contemporary and traditional. These were also the inspiration for the installation.
The show also includes a section dedicated to the history of the Studio, presenting the Ten White Lekythoi (1956), the most perfect book in the history of Greek artistic printing, and the fruit of many years of hard work on the part of Yannis Kefallinos, the founder of the Studio, and his students. Visitors will also have the opportunity to examine the first attempts at printing by artists who would later become well-known including Vasso Katraki, Chronis Botsoglou, Yiannis Bouteas, Nella Golanda, Aria Komianou and a good many others.

This is an especially impressive exhibition because it records an important aspect of Greek artistic production in the books of the artists past and present of the Graphic Design Studio at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

A show for viewers or readers? Does it matter? For art-lovers, naturally, and bibliophiles, that much is for sure!