Workroom of Fine Arts Annual exhibition 2001
The exhibition of the Education Department - Workroom of Fine Arts of the Rethymnon Center for Contemporary Art (today Contemporary Art Museum of Crete), which was inaugurated on Wednesday September 19, 2001, at the Municipal Art Gallery "L. Kanakakis" was a festival of joy and colors.
A year's 2D or 3D works by young and old, using all means of expression, -oil, acrylic, pencils, water colors, clay, paper, wire etc., - were admired by art lovers, among them the Mayor of Rethymnon Dimitris Archontakis, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Center and the Deputy mayor Vangelis Tsourlakis, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Center.
Programs relating to the city and the built environment resulted in houses on paper and construction compositions, children's hands tried for the first time engraving, while clay gave trucks and buses with their passengers, inspired by children’s imagination.
The adult sections, more mature than ever, included design and color exercises, works of patience, for some exercises of the soul, for others essays of lurking passion that the viewer can read in the expressionistic writing of some of the older Workroom students.
The exhibition also presented some pieces of work by students who prepared for admission in the schools of Architecture and Technical Institutes, in whose exams the preparation department of the Rethymnon Center for Contemporary Art- which started its operation in 2000- has been highly successful this year as well.
What particularly intrigued the visitors was a large environment with trees, work of children and adults,-especially adults. Green trees, burnt trees, trees hurt by human intervention and "civilization".
All this work was realized on the occasion of a program aiming at the support of environment and of car-free cities and was carried out as a deposit in the degraded old city but also in the parts of the city intended for residence, such as Kallithea, which is being built without any parks.
At the same time, the exhibition presented the film "Dyo+26", a production of the Center on the work process of the artists Dimitris Alithinos and Angelos Skourtis and art oriented students of the Athens College and which in 1999 was uploaded on the internet, as the official participation of Greece, in the European program "Artist on line". Finally, the material "The spirit of the age" was presented as a museum suitcase destined to travel and be exhibited in alternative places.
CRETAN ARTISTS
On the ground floor of the Gallery, a small exhibition with works of Cretan artists from the Center's Permanent Collection, namely Nikos Alexiou, the well-known Rethymnian artist who recently donated to the Center three works from the "Moni Arsaniou" series, Kalliopi Asargiotaki, Nikos Viskadourakis, Theofilos Geredakis, Manolis Zacharioudakis, Andreas Theodorakis, Valerios Kaloutsis, Lefteris Kanakakis, Giannis Lasithiotakis, Anna Palieraki, Ilias Papailiakis, Sofia Portalaki, Lily Stefanaki, Giannis Stefanakis, Vangelis Tzermias, was organized.
The exhibition, as well as the exhibition of Yannis Koumentakis, which was hosted at the Ibrahim Han mosque, in the Fortezza, and in the "8" art space, at 8 Himaras Street, ran until October 30, 2001.
