Alex Mylona in one of her early paintings, captures the image of her house’s garden in an abstract way and simplified style, trying to convey the feeling of this bright, colorful and spring environment. For the artist, it is the life-giving breath of nature itself that enters the house and occupies it, the resonance of its visual stimuli, their transformation into color, light and atmosphere. It is a breath of hope and optimism that transcends any kind of isolation and limitation. [Alex Mylona, Garden, 1953, Athens, oil on cardboard, 38 x 29 cm, MOMus-Museum Alex Mylona]

At a time when home proves to be, except from a resting place and a family hearth, the utmost shelter for protection against invisible enemies, it is not too late to consider all those which in these conditions remain homeless, with a tent as their only roof, obliged to abandon their roots, and to live in a dark uncertainty about everything. [Photo: Petros Giannakouris, Idomeni, February 28, 2016] [From the past exhibition "Another life: Human flows, unknown Odysseys" (2016) at MOMus - Thessaloniki Museum of Photography]

One of the most prolific and pluralistic artists of the world, Dennis Oppenheim, through many and different techniques (land art, performance, video, installations, sculpture), was always trying to bring art and aesthetics to their limits. The drawing that is presented here entitled "A device to root out evil" is one of many preliminary sketches that he had done for the construction of a public art sculpture with monumental dimensions, with which he participated in the national USA pavilion in the 1997 Venice Biennial. In the last twenty years of his career, he was systematically involved in public art and architecture, despite the fact that many of his versions of this public work were rejected or even destroyed, since he was depicting a typical American church of New England upside down. He also was saying that "It's a very simple gesture that's made here, simply turning something upside-down. One is always looking for a basic gesture in sculpture, economy of gesture: it is the simplest, most direct means to a work. Turning something upside-down elicits a reversal of content and pointing a steeple into the ground directs it to hell as opposed to heaven". [Dennis Oppenheim, Study for device to root out evil, 1997, Pencil. colored pencils, aquarelle and pastel on paper, 195 x 127cm, MOMus - Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections]

The Futurist poets and painters in Russia professed that a sweeping subversion of the world as we know it is necessary in order to open the way to a brighter future. They believed that the abolition of old values and axiomatic principles will enable humanity to revisit its relation with the universe and with nature, and consequently to obtain limitless potential. When the world has turned into chaos, they would assert in 1913, “new, unexpected and invisible connections” will be revealed. Their model of the man of the future - the Futurist hero - was the aviator, the man who succeeded in overcoming nature’s limitations and achieve the ultimate freedom by flying in the air. Aleksei Morgunov’s “Standing Figure (Aviator)” belongs to this series of visual and literary avant-garde works of art, which support the Futurist belief that after a historic reorganization of the order of the world, humanity will emerge stronger. [Aleksei Morgunov, “Standing Figure (Aviator)”, 1912-1913, Oil on canvas, MOMus -Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection]

We are looking at the image of an interior space, with the table and the tools of the artist's artworks in the foreground. A calm reality, a simple image with familiar objects, an image of silence that creates a warm and serene impression, but, at the same time, exudes a sense of melancholy, isolation and loneliness. Alex Mylona captures, with unique color and design simplicity, her shelter. She manages, in a simple and unpretentious way, to express all that she feels, her vital and experiential relationship with art and life, while the open window of the attic bridges her personal, private world with the world outside. [Alex Mylona, The attic at Christine road (Paris), 1987, watercolor, 28,5 x 20 cm, MOMus - Museum Alex Mylona]

Miltos Manetas’ painting highlights the dynamics of online technology, since the early 1990s. Over time, he manages to monument objects and material of the technological microcosm to which we usually do not pay much attention to, or sometimes we consider them cheap and even try to hide them, such as cables. However, the cables' tiny tangled wires may not be places, transmitters or receivers, but they are bridges; thanks to which energy and mechanical loads of any type circulate, communicate and somehow keep us together tirelessly, carrying sound, information, energy and light. [Manetas Miltos (1964, Greece) , Cables (Togetherness), 2009, Oil on canvas, Donation of the artist to the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections]

The work of Avraam Pavlidis pays tribute for three decades now in the local folk culture, its various manifestations and the places it resides. The public discourse during these cloudy days turned its lights justly towards the most vulnerable groups such as, among others, the elderly people. Will tomorrow’s sunnier times though offer the least of care for these veterans and every vulnerable group? Will we experience a conscious respect for the elderly, for the culture they created or guarded for the generations to come? [Avraam Pavlidis, Orfani Amerissa, St. Anna, Skyros, 15.7.2000, MOMus - Thessaloniki Museum of Photography]

Antonis Papadopoulos balances between the real and the imaginary with the skill of a professional acrobat, as he chooses to depict real - ordinary objects but with a surreal way, as one can see in this particular diptych, isolating the bread and the roof tile from time and space, giving them supersized dimensions and symbolic tones. Of course he highlights the fact that nothing else matters, in the present condition, than the "return to the essentials", commenting on the same time just how much some take food and home for granted, while for others they are just as absent. [Antonis Papadopoulos, Untitled, pastels on canvas- diptych, 150 x 150 cm., 2004-05, Donation of the artist to SMCA, MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections]

The tendency towards the representation of what cannot be represented realistically, such as, for example, a dream, a vision or a wish, was the theme for a series of works of the artists of Russian Avant-garde, that expressed human turmoil while confronting the Universe. Such works often reflected in different ways the thinking of theosophists or the dreamy state of symbolists. A celestial challenge of this kind is depicted in Solomon Nikritin's painting entitled “Man and Cloud” (1930), in which the cloud hovers like a lifeline above a tiny figure standing alone on an islet in the middle of nowhere. Amongst the gray, empty and lifeless environment, the colored cloud, in which small stories are revealed, expresses everything that could be a pleasant memory of life and, moreover, every visionary expectation for the upcoming world. [Solomon Nikritin, “Man and Cloud”, 1930, oil on canvas, MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection]

Homes, besides being the nucleus of personal life, are also places where people store what they want to preserve in time, whatever they can’t live without. Thus they become, especially some corners in them, small private museums that disclose our preferences and contradictions, our particular or commonplace aesthetics, how much we depend on the important and the trivial, how unprepared we are to face some kind of an end. [Marilia Fotopoulou, From the series Interior Decoration, 2015, MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography]