The exhibition
Ekfrasi – yianna grammatopoulou presents the solo exhibition of Apollon Glykas entitled Airborne.
A promotional airship from the 1960s, once belonging to the artist’s family, serves as both the starting point and a symbolic vehicle for a journey through time. By dismantling a Zeppelin that can no longer fly and reconstructing a peculiar family heirloom that cannot simply be thrown away, Glykas brings together lived experience, memory, and its photographic representation. For the reconstruction of the airship, the artist uses connectors from old shops and tent ribs. Its distinctive skeletal structure can be fully dismantled and stored inside its original blue bag, embroidered with white lettering: Airborne.
A series of photographs surrounds the airship, which occupies the centre of the gallery. They form a distinctive journey through places connected to the artist’s life and memory—Areopoli, Tzoumerka, Ermioni, Ouranoupoli, Methana, among others—where unexpected elements, such as a disco ball and an athletics track surface, enter the landscape, transforming it into compositions that evoke collage. The artist scans the photographic film, digitally intervenes in the images, and then transfers them back onto film, before developing them in the darkroom. He experiments with expired photographic papers and family remnants whose surfaces have lost their original whiteness and freshness. The mechanism of observation that runs through the photographic works also re-emerges in the reddish sanguine drawings that complete the exhibition. Lived experience, repetition, and memory come together in this new body of work. As art historian and curator Christoforos Marinos writes: “Airborne is an exhibition about the value of process and time as material. The old papers, handmade frames, early photographs, and the promotional airship each have their own biography, their own time.”
Exhibition text: Christoforos Marinos, art historian and curator
Opening: Thursday October 15, 19:00 – 22:00
Duration: October 15 – November 7, 2026
— The artist
Selected Works
