For more than twenty-five years, Hydra School Projects has been one of the Mediterranean’s most distinctive contemporary art initiatives. Founded in 1999 by artist and curator Dimitrios Antonitsis, it transformed a former school building on Hydra into an exhibition space where internationally renowned artists and emerging voices engage in site-specific installations shaped by the island itself.

Antonitsis has often described the project’s beginnings in simple terms: he wanted a reason to spend more time on Hydra while creating an ambitious platform for contemporary art. That personal vision gradually evolved into one of Greece’s longest-running independent curatorial initiatives, attracting artists, collectors, curators and museums from around the world.

Rather than being organised around commercial trends or market cycles, Hydra School Projects is driven by a curatorial idea. While many of the exhibited works are available for acquisition, each edition begins with a conceptual framework that encourages artists to respond directly to the architecture, history and atmosphere of the former school. The classrooms, corridors and courtyards retain traces of their educational past, creating an environment where contemporary art exists in dialogue with memory, history and everyday life.

This year’s exhibition, HYDOR/ONAR (Water of Dreams) continues that tradition. Bringing together artists including Brice Marden, Jannis Kounellis, Daniel Silver, Ashley Bickerton, Hussein Chalayan, Despina Charitonidi, Ayumi Paul and Styliane Philippou, the exhibition explores water as both a physical and psychological space, connecting dreams, mythology and cultural memory.

The Last Brice Marden

Few artists are more deeply connected to Hydra than Brice Marden (1938–2023), one of the most influential American painters of the post-war period. Emerging during the 1960s, Marden first became known for his restrained monochrome paintings, whose subtle surfaces placed him alongside Minimalism. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, his work gradually evolved into a highly personal language of looping, interwoven lines inspired by landscape, music, handwriting and Chinese calligraphy. By the end of his career, he was widely regarded as one of the defining abstract painters of his generation.

Marden first arrived on Hydra in 1971, and the island would remain central to his life and work for more than fifty years. What began as a summer retreat gradually became a second home, where he established a studio and returned year after year. Hydra offered him something increasingly rare: a place where landscape, antiquity and everyday life existed in constant dialogue. The island’s extraordinary light, dry stone walls, olive groves and rugged terrain profoundly shaped the evolution of his painting.

Rather than depicting Hydra directly, Marden absorbed its rhythms. His flowing linear compositions, for which he became internationally celebrated, have often been understood as visual equivalents of movement through the island itself. His deep interest in Chinese calligraphy found an unexpected harmony with Hydra’s physical landscape, allowing gesture and place to merge into one of the most distinctive abstract languages of the late twentieth century.

One of the exhibition’s most moving moments is the presentation of what Dimitrios Antonitsis describes as the last drawing Brice Marden created in Hydra.

The drawing was made during the summer following the opening of Brice Marden and Greek Antiquity at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens in 2022 — the artist’s first museum exhibition in Greece and one that had been developed over many years through close collaboration between Marden and Antonitsis. After returning to Hydra that summer, Marden created this drawing before leaving the island. At the time, no one imagined it would become the final drawing he would ever make there.

Seen today, the work has acquired an unexpected poignancy.

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It feels less like an isolated drawing than a quiet act of departure — a final farewell to the island that had shaped his artistic imagination for more than half a century.

Jannis Kounellis: The Goldfish and the Knife

The exhibition also revisits the legacy of Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017), the Greek-born artist widely regarded as one of the founding figures of Arte Povera.

At Hydra School Projects, his work brings together a live goldfish and a knife in a simple, unsettling arrangement. Like much of Kounellis’ practice, the work uses ordinary materials to create a charged encounter between life and threat, fragility and violence, poetry and danger.

Kounellis often introduced living elements, industrial materials and everyday objects into his installations, rejecting traditional ideas of sculpture as something fixed or purely decorative. In this work, the goldfish becomes more than a motif. It is a living presence. Placed in relation to the knife, it turns the installation into a quiet but tense meditation on vulnerability, survival and the instability of life itself.

Daniel Silver and the Return of Colour

The exhibition’s dialogue with classical sculpture continues in the work of Daniel Silver.

Silver’s sculptural heads appear at first glance to belong to the classical tradition, yet they deliberately resist archaeological certainty. Rather than presenting idealised white marble forms, he introduces delicate washes of watercolour across their surfaces.

Antonitsis explains that this subtle use of colour directly challenges one of the great myths of Western art history: that classical sculpture was originally colourless. Silver instead reminds viewers that colour was once fundamental to sculpture, reconnecting contemporary practice with aspects of antiquity that were gradually forgotten.

Placed alongside Kounellis’ questioning of classical whiteness, Silver’s sculptures become part of a broader conversation about how history is remembered, restored and sometimes misunderstood.

More Than an Exhibition

What distinguishes Hydra School Projects is not simply the calibre of its participating artists but the consistency of Dimitrios Antonitsis’ curatorial vision.

For more than twenty-five years he has developed an exhibition programme that privileges dialogue, experimentation and site-specific thinking over spectacle. International artists including Brice Marden, Jannis Kounellis, Kiki Smith, Ashley Bickerton, Daniel Silver and many others have exhibited within the modest classrooms of the former school, demonstrating that some of contemporary art’s most compelling conversations do not necessarily take place inside the world’s largest museums.

Hydra School Projects has become one of the defining cultural events of the Greek summer. More than an annual exhibition, it is an ongoing dialogue between artists, history and one extraordinary island. Standing in the former classrooms overlooking the Aegean, it becomes clear that the project’s greatest achievement lies not only in the artists it has brought together, but in creating a place where contemporary art and Hydra continue to shape one another year after year.