Vaso Katraki: Hurtful Bodies at Roma Gallery, Athens

 Vaso Katraki, (R) Forest, 1972; (C) Invitation II, 1979;

(L) Metapoliteusi, 1974, prints engraved on stone

Vaso Katraki
Hurtful Bodies
Roma Gallery, Athens

By ALIA TSAGKARI April 19, 2025

Vaso Katraki (1914–1988) stands as a seminal figure in the canon of 20th-century European art, whose profound engagement with form, materiality, and socio-political commentary has yet to be fully acknowledged on the international stage. Her groundbreaking adoption of sandstone as an engraving substrate and her reappropriation of archaic, preclassical figuration position her as a radical innovator, challenging conventional hierarchies of Western art. Despite her participation in major international exhibitions—including the São Paulo Biennial (1957), the Biennale of Mediterranean Countries in Alexandria (1957), the Venice Biennale in 1966 (where she was awarded the Tamarind Prize), the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund (1976), and the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Basel (1978), among others—Katraki’s work has frequently been filtered through reductive frameworks. Too often, her oeuvre has been framed within narratives of folkloric heritage or politicized martyrdom, obscuring the formal complexity and material innovation that define her practice.

The exhibition Vaso Katraki:Hurtful Bodies at Roma Gallery in Athens seeks to readdress this oversight by repositioning Katraki’s work within a rigorous methodological framework that transcends the sanctioned narratives of national endurance. Curated with an emphasis on the interplay between corporeal form and ideological content, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s late period, wherein bodies emerge not merely as a subject of representation but as an ideological and formal construct that reconfigures the anthropomorphic myth.

In these works, the elongated figures, imbued with references to Cycladic, Archaic, and Geometric art, operate as a rupture within established taxonomic systems, destabilizing the boundaries between the 'civilized' and the 'savage' body. These bodies are unyielding and rigid, retaining the rawness and starkness of the sandstone in which they are engraved, dominating an uninterrupted spatial field of off-white cotton paper. Depth is negated; illusionistic space is irrevocably shattered. There is no point of escape from the body's sovereignty.

 
Vaso Katraki, Untitled II, 1987, print engraved on stone

The transition from woodcut to sandstone engraving in the mid-1950s marked a decisive turning point in Katraki’s artistic practice. Sandstone, with its rough, porous, and brittle nature, necessitated the use of sculptural tools and techniques, dictating the elimination of redundant detail while enabling monumentality. This shift expanded both the expressive potential and the scale of her works, igniting new formal concerns. Between 1967 and 1968, during her exile on Gyaros following the imposition of the Greek Military Junta, Katraki's sharply defined human and animal figures drawn in black marker on smooth pebbles served both as a means of processing her exile and as a crystallization of her robust contours. These contours would come to dominate her rendering of the human form upon her return from exile, where the unmediated exposure to violence cemented a sombre reality and the prevalence of hurtful bodies. In the wake of both political upheaval and formal experimentation, Katraki’s engraving language approximates more the handling of the human body in works of preclassical Greek cultures, such as Cycladic figurines, the black-figure ceramics of the Geometric and Archaic periods, and Archaic sculpture.

 Vaso Katraki, (R) Woman with Child and Flower, ca. 1960, sandstone matrix; (L) Situation II, 1970, print engraved on stone

Indeed, the affinities between the human bodies in Katraki’s engravings and the archaic forms of the prehistoric Aegean were highlighted in a landmark 2010 exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. However, any reference to the concept of primitivism was omitted. Primitivism, understood as the Western reception and appropriation of forms and practices from racial and cultural otherness, offered European modernist artists an alternative perception of the past, one unburdened by Western epistemological constructs. Through this aestheticized view of primitivism, preclassical artefacts from non-Western cultures became iconographic models for an abstracted and reductive approach to form. Soon, to the so-called ‘primitive’ artefacts of autochthonous peoples from Africa and Oceania were added the archaeological finds of preclassical Greek cultures, a connection that gained traction—particularly in France—through reviews such as Cahiers d’Art and Documents. A telling example is one of the earliest critical assessments of Giacometti’s sculpture, in which Christian Zervos highlights its affinity with Cycladic art as a form of primitive sculpture.[1] However, Giacometti’s primitivism, like that of most modernists—Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani, and Moore, to name but a few—is purely morphological and thus gutless, if not outright colonialist.

 
Vaso Katraki, (R) Young Woman with Child, 1979, sandstone matrix; (L) Attack, 1985, print engraved on stone

Within these historical and methodological frameworks, the present curatorial approach to Katraki’s late work foregrounds the reappropriation, whether conscious or unconscious, of primitivism and its rendering of the human form transferred on paper as primordial, unrefined, and hurtful. In particular, within the critical reception of modernism and its cultural products, this analysis aligns ideologically with Rosalind Krauss’s concept of a ‘hard’,[2] non-aestheticized primitivism, yet diverges in two key respects: firstly, in its temporal focus on contemporary Greek art rather than European modernism, and secondly, in its articulation through corporeal representations that directly reference the 'primitive' Greek civilizations with which Katraki was profoundly and experientially familiar. At this juncture, the primitivism of Katraki’s figures is not haunted by the spectre of colonialism that weighs heavily upon European modernism.

 
Vaso Katraki, Loneliness of Antigone, 1977, print engraved on stone

As a final gesture, Katraki’s formal language does not merely reference archaic prototypes—it disrupts the very mechanics of primitivisation. The rendering of her figures, while echoing prehistoric artefacts, refuse the exoticised gaze. Instead, they dismantle the binary of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’, asserting themselves as autonomous, materially inscribed forms. Unlike the European avant-garde, which often imposed reductive aesthetics onto ‘wild’ bodies to serve a Western narrative, Katraki engraves the body as site of memory and trauma—physical, political, and existential. Through a stark, morbid plasticity stripped of idealisation, Katraki reclaims the so-called ‘primitive’ as an expression of cultural difference—not to romanticise, but to resist. In doing so, her Hurtful Bodies rupture the smooth surfaces of classical ideals and stake a powerful claim in the global history of engraving.

 
Vaso Katraki, Sun and Iron, 1979, print engraved on stone

Vaso Katraki: Hurtful Bodies will be on view in Roma Gallery , Athens Greece - til 3 May, 2025