The Benaki Museum Winter Exhibition

The Benaki Museum Winter Exhibition is an annual exhibition cycle opening in the second half of January and running into early March across the Benaki Museum’s two Athens sites. The museum was founded in 1930 by Antonis Benakis, an Alexandria-born collector who settled in Athens in 1926 and gave his collections and the building housing them to the Greek state at the museum’s inauguration in 1931.

The cycle runs across two sites. The main building, at the corner of Koumbari and Vasilissis Sofias beside the National Garden, is the Benakis family house, enlarged in 1911 by the architect Anastasios Metaxas. It holds the permanent collections of Greek art from prehistory to the twentieth century alongside smaller temporary exhibitions. The Pireos 138 annex, designed by architects Maria Kokkinou and Andreas Kourkoulas, covers 8,200 square metres arranged around an internal courtyard, with approximately 3,000 square metres of galleries and a 300-seat amphitheatre. It hosts the larger contemporary art and photography programmes.

The 2026 winter cycle included a design show drawn from the Mentis threadworks at the main building and the Alexis Akrithakis retrospective at Pireos 138. The 2027 programme is published in the new year. The main building is open until midnight on Thursdays and closed on Tuesdays.