“Words and images drink the same wine. There is no purity to protect,” South African artist Marlene Dumas once said, echoing her paintings. “Open-End,” her solo show at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2022, was a revelation touching upon two themes that are intrinsically linked to the Italian city: love and death.

Dumas was equally brash in her most recent show at the Frith Street Gallery in London, “Mourning Marsyas,” a frenzied dance of emotions that commented on the freedom of man and the cruelty of the gods, and included the piece “Two Gods,” depicting two monumental phalluses.

There aren’t too many painters who explore erotic subjects and even fewer who do so in a way that is truly sensuous, without bordering on the pornographic. The human nude, usually female, and an art school staple, has been rendered in the visual arts again and again in a hedonistic light. Such sensuality in the depiction of the male body has now also been “permitted” thanks to the growing prevalence of homoerotic themes from gay male artists.

Pondering the work of Dumas and casting my mind back to the brash and radical Louise Bourgeois, I wonder about the Greek art scene. Is the depiction of erotic desire, the battle in the bedroom, the violence or adoration stirred by the female and male body, legitimized when it comes from female artists in this country?

An admittedly not exhaustive search through the permanent collection of the National Gallery yields a sensual woodcut on Chinese paper by Dimitrios Galanis titled “Nudes in a Landscape” from 1919-1920, and an older, bolder “Nude” by Lembesis Polychronis from 1877 of thereabouts. Both pieces depict female figures. Jumping forward in time, Giorgos Rorris’ 2003 “Self-Portrait” reveals the story of a female body that is open to the gaze, without clothing – that’s how the artist described his nudes, pushing the erotic element to the background – via the mediation of the artist’s glance.

And then I see Maria Filopoulou’s “Underwater Swimmers” (2020), a large-scale painting of men’s and women’s naked bodies playfully and delightfully frolicking in the abundant eroticism of a clear, blue sea. Filopoulou is, therefore, the obvious person to reach out to in my exploration of how female artists in Greece are approaching the subject of erotic desire.

I also reached out to Irini Iliopoulou and Maria Giannakaki, both of whom have held solo shows on the subject, the former in 2019, titled “Erotically,” and the latter in 2020, titled “Spring in Winter.”

‘If I had a comprehensive body of work on the male nude, I would have the courage to show it now. The older I get, the more at ease I feel’

But as one experienced curator so aptly commented – and the artists conceded – all three painters presented these pieces at a time when they were in a position to defend them, knowing that they would be strictly judged by viewers, both male and female.

Maria Filopoulou

“Am I interested in the aspect of eroticism in my work? Yes, absolutely, but it is tacit. The naked bodies in the water seek absolute freedom of movement and are, therefore, erotic in that sense. But they are not provocative. I don’t like being provocative, and this is not because someone has dictated that I shouldn’t be. What I wanted to convey with the ‘Swimmers’ was that sense of the hospitable water element, the liberation of the body from the constraints of clothing, the sensuality of young bodies. But that’s as far as it goes.

“If I had a comprehensive body of work on the male nude, I would have the courage to show it now. The older I get, the more at ease I feel. Either society used to be more conservative back in the day or I was more bashful. Perhaps it was a case of both being true. However, if a piece – a composition of swimmers, say – were commissioned by a male couple, then I would add as many naked bodies as I wanted, in whatever poses I wanted. I have been censored once only, and that was in London in 2013 at an exhibition in Mayfair, where my nudes were accused of offending women wearing the burqua. I also remember the case of a painting depicting a naked girl. It was purchased by a man, but the sale was canceled later because his wife didn’t want the naked figure of another woman in her house.”

Irini Iliopoulou

“The ‘Erotically’ series began as a kind of art journal years before the exhibition took place. I wanted to dabble a little. The drawings that emerged – very realistic ones – stayed in the drawer for three years. When I looked at them again, I decided that I wanted to do something with them, but in a way that undermined their realism. The deluge of water – of watercolor, that is – on the drawings helped me convey the aura of the erotic act, while the fluidity of the paint was like a confession of the unmentionable. Exhibiting them didn’t seem like a big deal when I was painting them, but I was anxious at the inauguration. I’d had some unpleasant experiences in the past, when showing paintings of male nudes. The women came to the show alone and reserved a piece, only for the sale to be canceled the next day when they came with their husbands. The paintings were eventually sold to a very good gallery in Mykonos.

“Thankfully, the ‘Erotically’ exhibition didn’t shock anyone. It helped, I think, that the paintings were accompanied by excerpts of international literature and poetry. I think it’s easier to talk about the erotic act in words rather than images. Taboos on the subject persist in Greece; viewers still feel a sense of guilt. As for me as an artist, perhaps, yes, in painting such a subject, I do feel that I am in conflict with the standards created by male painters who dominate collective memory.”

Maria Giannakaki

“Yes, it is harder for a woman painter than it is for men. There’s a stereotype that also seems to prevent me from expressing myself as I would like. I don’t set out to shock the audience or to put my gallery on the spot. Personally, I would much rather worry artistically about how best to render my composition than about how to change it or hide elements of it so as not to insult public sensibilities. But I have heard: ‘Maria, we didn’t expect this of you!’ Or, ‘Change it; we’re going to get a lot of heat!’ I admit to censoring my own work. Erotica is a theme I am interested in and I would like to be even bolder in my approach. I used to do it more romantically, with smaller pieces that depicted the body from the waist up.

“In the paintings from the ‘Spring in Winter’ series, which was hastily presented at the start of the pandemic, we see a marriage between sensuality and the need for human contact. The erotic bodies come together on this premise. I am not interested in pornography; what I want is to properly convey the atmosphere of female pleasure, the desire of love. I may do a similar series again, but it will be for me, not for public exhibition.”