Opening: Wednesday 18 February 2026, 19:30

The world of Martial Raysse (Golfe-Juan, France, 1936), one of the most inventive artists of postwar European art, flows between dream and reality. 

From the fluorescent objects and the pop aesthetic of the 1960s, when European and American art were searching for new forms and languages, to the outdoor works and masked portraits, his journey to this day is a continuous search between pop aesthetics, social observation, and personal immersion in art, with clear phases and transformations. Raysse's art speaks of life and imagination, a constant play between extroversion and introversion, societal critique and the personal magic of art.

Unwaveringly dedicated to art and the renewal of his mediums, materials, and practices, he is constantly experimenting. Behind his paintings, he often hides altered photography; he jumps from painting to cinema, and from cinema to painting.

At the core of the exhibition Martial Raysse. Sinéma is his lesser-known work, focusing on films and videos: it is where his art intersects with experimental cinema through the use of color, materiality, and everyday life as fields of experimentation. A brilliant self-taught craftsman himself, always alert to the new technologies of the time, he fully utilizes the vast possibilities offered by the groundbreaking audiovisual medium, starting from the early days of color television. 

The human form, landscapes, mythology, humor, and the social and consumer realities of the 1960s —shaped by advertising, pop culture, and mass production— are consistently present, alongside multiple technical effects and his personal chromatic language, "Martialcolor," which reflects the intensity of pop art and the spectacular excess of cinematic Technicolor. Film and video, which transcend traditional production techniques, become a new form of painting. The exhibition, which invites the visitor to discover how the artist extends, through the moving image, his plastic and conceptual research, features films and videos created from 1966 to 2008. Between poetry, provocation, and formal freedom, his films reveal a coherent and deeply current work, in which each image — fixed or animated—participates in a global reflection on representation and our relationship to reality.

“For me, cinema is like a seismological record of all the images that pass through my mind”, he stated. 

For the first time in Greece, the groundbreaking moving image works of Martial Raysse reveal an unknown side of a pioneering artist, where video and cinema intersect with painting, becoming material, gesture, and a tool for rethinking contemporary visual culture.

The exhibition is coorganised by Fonds Martial Raysse.

Curated by: Thouli Misirloglou, Artistic Director of MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Musuem of Contemporary Art Collections

Assistant Curator: Theodore Markoglou 

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