The title Greeks of the West. Lights, Shadows and Visions of the Contemporary stems from the desire to intertwine the historical memory of Ortigia—beating heart of Greek culture in the Mediterranean—with the artistic experiences of authors who, over the years, have chosen this island as a privileged place of research and creation.
On display are many mature artists whose expressive journeys reflect layered paths, marked by languages, visions, and experimentations that have continuously engaged in dialogue with Ortigia’s millenary history. Their works thus become a living testimony of a constant relationship with the territory: a dialogue between past and present, between light and shadow, between ancient roots and a tension towards the contemporary.
This exhibition aims to return to the public not only a survey of individual poetics but also the collective value of a shared path, in which art becomes an echo of memory and, at the same time, an opening towards new visions.

The Exhibition
In the heart of Ortigia, an island of memory and myth, the Montevergine Contemporary Art Gallery hosts the exhibition Greeks of the West. Lights, Shadows and Visions of the Contemporary, curated by Marilena Vita.
The exhibition brings together for the first time a diverse group of Syracuse-based artists, united by a deep cultural belonging to their territory.
Through painting, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition explores the legacy of “Western Greekness”—not as nostalgia or local rhetoric, but as a living sedimentation of forms, visions, and tensions that find a shared root in the city of Syracuse. The project reflects on the relationship between art and the Mediterranean landscape, between collective memory and contemporary languages, offering a plural and poetic reading of Syracuse’s artistic production.
An exhibition path that enhances the anthropological dimension of art, inspired by Joseph Beuys’ thought: “everyone is an artist”. A research process connected to the vision of human society as a “social sculpture.” At the center of the exhibition is not the artist’s curriculum, but the urgency of expression, the gesture, the act of making as a creative and civic action.

Artists:
Salvatore Accolla, Eliana Adorno, Francesco Bertrand, Saverio Bertrand, Angelo Cassia Fiore, Max Mensa, Giovanni Migliara, Salvatore Li Puma, Giuseppe Pravato, Sandra Rizza, Alfredo Romano, Mela Salemi, Marilena Vita.