Niki Kanagini

Kanagini was born in Alexandroupoli, in Greek Thrace, in 1933. In the early 1950s she studied at the École Cantonale de Dessin et d’Art Appliqué in Lausanne; the National Gallery and the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) give slightly different starting years. From 1954 to 1958 she studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where her teachers were the painter Yannis Moralis and the engraver Yannis Kefallinos. With a scholarship from the National Hellenic Research Foundation, she continued at the Central School of Arts and Design in London from 1958 to 1961.

Her first solo exhibition took place in 1962 at La Feluca Gallery in Rome, and in the same year she settled permanently in Athens. She also taught for many years: at the Vakalo School (1963–1967), at the Centre for Technological Applications (1970–1971) and, as a special instructor, at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1984–1986). She wrote articles for newspapers, magazines and exhibition catalogues.

In the 1990s she created performative works and installations with the critic Eleni Varopoulou. They were presented at the Argos–Mycenae Festival in 1996 and at the Summer Academy of the National Theatre of Greece in 2002–2004. Kanagini died in Athens in 2008. That year the magazine Εξώπολις (Exopolis) published a tribute calling her a famous artist from Alexandroupoli.

Kanagini’s early work was strongly abstract and shaped by modernist ideas, including those of the Bauhaus; the National Gallery also notes an expressionist style with intense colour. In the early 1960s an interest in clothing and fabric led her to tapestry. A series of ink-and-marker drawings from 1966–1967, now at MOMus in Thessaloniki, shows the influence of weaving through rhythm, repetition and gesture. In 1971 her large tapestries were shown at the 5th International Tapestry Biennial in Lausanne. Later she combined tapestry, printmaking and traditional techniques in spatial constructions that criticised the destruction of nature and questioned the traditional role of women.

Εν οίκω (At Home, 1975), a mixed-media work in the EMST collection, has been read by critics as a clothesline in dialogue with feminist art that uses household objects. From the mid-1970s she painted the Χειρόγραφα (Manuscripts): oil on canvas or prepared wood and mixed media on paper and fabric, with columns of an illegible personal script. She called such works “visual texts” and thought of the viewer as a “possible reader”. The National Gallery owns Εφημερίδα (Newspaper, 1975), a pencil drawing on paper measuring 200 × 140 cm, and Χειρόγραφο (Manuscript, 1978–1979), oil on wood measuring 232 × 160 × 10 cm. Her exhibitions included the Alexandria Biennale (1980), Europalia in Brussels (1982) and Gender: Female at the House of Cyprus in Athens (1993).

Kanagini’s works are held by the National Gallery in Athens, EMST and MOMus in Thessaloniki. In 2010 the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki held a posthumous retrospective, Domestic Scene. In 2023 the Roma Gallery in Athens showed her Manuscripts under the title η υλικότητα της γραφής (the materiality of writing). EMST’s retrospective An Ode to Things, curated by Tina Pandi, runs from 2 April 2026 to 14 February 2027. Try this: open the National Gallery’s online page for Χειρόγραφο and read its label, Λάδι σε ξύλο (oil on wood). Then look at the image and test three of our own sentences: Βλέπω σημάδια σαν γράμματα (I see marks like letters), Δεν μπορώ να διαβάσω ούτε μία λέξη (I cannot read a single word) and Το έργο μοιάζει με μεγάλη σελίδα (The work looks like a large page). Keep the ones that fit and correct the others.

• Kanagini studied art in three countries: Switzerland, Greece and the United Kingdom.
• In 1971 her tapestries returned to Lausanne, the city of her first studies, for the International Tapestry Biennial.
• The title of EMST’s 2026 retrospective comes from a poem by Pablo Neruda found among her papers.
• Her painting Χειρόγραφο measures 232 × 160 cm and is painted on wood, not canvas.