Each summer, just after the final day of Art Basel, the international art scene shifts from Switzerland to the Greek island of Hydra. The DESTE Foundation’s annual exhibition at the Slaughterhouse has become one of the most closely watched events of the season, a magnetic convergence of artists, curators, collectors, and gallerists. DSCENE Magazine has covered it each year, tracing its evolution into a ritualistic opening for the European summer.
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This year, DESTE presents Apocalypse Now and Then, a solo exhibition by Romanian-American artist Andra Ursuţa, marking her first major presentation in Greece. Installed inside the Foundation’s Project Space, a former abattoir perched on a hill overlooking the sea, the exhibition transforms the site into a fictional archaeology, where fragments of imagined civilizations meet our own collective dread.
The show opens at sunset, timed with Hydra’s most spectacular view, where the Aegean horizon turns molten gold and the island becomes a surreal stage for Ursuţa’s work. It’s an atmosphere that blurs the distinction between past and future, myth and material.
In Apocalypse Now and Then, Ursuţa introduces her new Desolation Ware series: lost-wax bronze sculptures that evoke surreal votives and distorted domestic forms. A tangle of snakes spills from a bicycle helmet, suggesting a modern Medusa. A jug fuses animalistic form with imagined desert ruins. A brutalist chair teeters between ergonomic support and ancient torture device. These works play with misunderstandings of art history, including the myth of pure-white classical sculpture, and reinterpret them through strange, theatrical lenses.
The installation draws from the conventions of archaeological museums, but subverts them. Objects appear unearthed yet freshly imagined, teetering between decay and invention. The space, raw, open, and constantly washed in sea air, becomes a temple to fictional ruins.
As with every year, the Hydra opening drew a constellation of art world figures: DESTE founder Dakis Joannou, artists like Jeff Koons and Maurizio Cattelan, New Museum’s Massimiliano Gioni, and a wave of international gallerists, collectors, and writers. What brings them is the exhibition and the sense of occasion it creates. DESTE’s Slaughterhouse openings aren’t just viewings. They’re pilgrimages.
Apocalypse Now and Then is on view from June 24 to October 31, 2025. The exhibition is open daily from 11:00–13:00 and 19:00–22:00 (closed Tuesdays, except opening day). The sunset, as always, is included.
