About

Dio Horia in Athens, Greece, is a gallery for contemporary art and culture, founded in 2018 by Marina Vranopoulou, General Coordinator @ DESTE Foundation in Hydra and Contemporary Art Curator.

 

Back in 2015, Dio Horia started as a non-commercial Art Platform, reacting to the commodification of the island of Mykonos. It followed the structure of DESTE Foundation’s Hydra projects, where artists were invited to study the 'topos' and then create in-situ projects and publications, with the main difference being that Vranopoulou invited artists coming from her own generation. As these artists had not yet exhibited in Greece, this secured the Greek educated art audience, the non-initiated art public & art students alike, an opportunity to witness and experience, otherwise elsewhere unavailable.

 

By 2018, Dio Horia Platform became an Art Gallery and timidly started participating in International Art Fairs following one strict premise: to always present previously unknown artists that most of the times the gallery has discovered from scratch, and that all come from small peripheral countries, historically connected to Greece, Greek history, and Greek culture. Maja Djordjevic, Hulda Guzman and Amir H. Fallah are just a few of the artists that Dio Horia first represented.

 

Αn all-year-round programme in Athens was only introduced in 2020; however, it was in the year 2022 that Dio Horia Gallery inaugurated an institutional space in the centre of Athens right next to the Acropolis Museum, in the place of a 4th c. AD villa urbana of the Late Antiquity, once again going back to the Greek roots, back to the fountain of creativity. In this space, the Gallery entertains a desire to revisit the past and unleash inveterate institutional art conventions, by focusing on post digital art, queer art, female empowerment, new technological media, ‘do it yourself’ trainings and all that is current and relevant.

 

“Dio Horia” name is inspired by Greek architect’s, Aris Konstantinidis, book: ‘Dio Horia from Mykonos’, where the phrase "dio horia" means "two spaces" or "two villages", referencing several dualities, such as the Athens Gallery and Residency program, the Greek roots and the International program, the dual audiences of the educated Art World member and the curious flâneur, and so on.