Revisiting: Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands brings together 15 international artists and 17 artworks from the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection, spanning sculpture, painting, photography,
printmaking, collage, video, lightboxes, and books, and dating from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, to explore Greece as a symbolic construct of both past and present, escaping fixed notions of place.
One year after its debut in Athens in 2025, where it inaugurated the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection Space, the exhibition Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands comes to the Hellenic Centre in London with a renewed perspective, shaped in part by the spatial parameters of the venue.
At its conceptual axis lies Fernweh – the German word for a “longing for distant places”, first recorded in 1835 by the German Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau to describe the melancholic longing he felt for places he had never visited. The term frames an exhibition that draws on the legacy of Romanticism to explore humanity’s enduring desire to pursue the unattainable and to reinterpret reality
through the intertwined lenses of knowledge, memory, and imagination. The artists assume the role of observers, navigating between experience and reverie, romantic
projection and historical consciousness. They reflect on Greece not only as a geographical territory but as a cultural and symbolic landscape – one long defined by journeys, myths, memories, and perceptions shaped over time.
Curated by Katerina Hadji and presented by the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection in collaboration with the Hellenic Centre.
Image: William Nelson Copley,
Homeric Emblem, 1961, Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection
SPECIAL PUBLIC EVENTS
Tuesday 13 October, 18:00 – 21:00 – Exhibition Private View. RSVP
here.
Friday 16 October, 09:30 – 11:00 – Breakfast reception. RSVP
here.
Saturday 17 October, 11:00 – Exhibition Private Tour with curator Katerina Hadji. RSVP
here.
