When renowned lawyer Sotiris Felios began collecting works in the 1980s, he never imagined that 40 years later he would create the finest private collection of living Greek artists. After all, his motivation was to co-exist with art, either at home or in the office, to enable creations to be admired by many eyes. He gradually built a body of 1500 acquisitions (paintings, sculptures, engravings, photographs) that show the cares, experiments, osmosis of the interior visual scene. They also show something else: the great potential that our compatriot artists have to stand out on the international stage, an extremely difficult battle since there is no cultural policy of extroversion in Greece. In relation to other European countries that systematically “export” their art products through museums and their networks, we place our hopes on individual efforts.

The lawyer, who has become friends with many artists, makes a noble effort to present their work either in exhibitions at the premises of his Other Arcadia foundation, in exhibitions abroad, or (more recently) using digital tools provided by Google. Since March 2021, The Other Arcadia has partnered with Google Arts & Culture, revealing the bulk of the collection through presentations to the digital platform’s global audience. A few days ago, on Thursday, May 18, International Museum Day, the virtual exhibition “Dream Skin: Works from the Sotiris Feliou Collection” opened. The name comes from the novel of the same name by Raymond Kino. The tribute, divided into six separate chapters, is dedicated to the “region” where artists have always found inspiration and refuge. Artistic supervision was undertaken by Dora Vasilaku and Daphni Politis. With the help of 45 paintings from a collection of 34 Greek artists, they tried to depict a deep and universal part of the human experience: dreams, the land of the subconscious. The “real” is given by artists of different generations who approached the subject from completely different points of view. From the dreamscapes of Mary Philopoulos to the waterfalls of Samothrace, to the female nudes of Rorris, to the surreal images of Bitsakis, to the paintings of our own Dimitris Handzopoulos, to the erotic works of Moralis, the skin of dreams mutates into suppleness. raw materials for the debtor. The digital exhibition offers a high quality tour thanks to the 3D imaging capability. The Sotiris Felios collection represents Greece in Google Arts, where art from many famous museums is ‘on display’. Among them are the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Carnegie Hall, Fondazione Fiera in Milan, the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, Palazzo Monti and others.