Collector Irene Y. Panagopoulos, whose collecting began with a handful of paintings given to her by her father, is showing works from her collection outside Greece for the first time. The exhibition, at the Hellenic Centre in London, brings together 17 works spanning the eighteenth century to the present day.

Titled Revisiting: Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands and curated by Katerina Hadji, the show explores how Greece has been imagined and reimagined through travel, memory and displacement. Its checklist moves across centuries and media, placing Elizabeth Peyton's Lord Byron (c. 1989) alongside Marc Chagall's Homère: L'Odyssée (1974), an eighteenth-century Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce by the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, and Bouchra Khalili's Mapping Journey #8 and The Constellations, Fig. 8 (both 2011).

The title's key term, Fernweh, is the German counterpart to nostalgia — a longing not for home but for faraway places — and it threads the exhibition's selection. Works chart Greece as a destination of the Grand Tour and a subject of classical scholarship in the eighteenth century, through twentieth-century modernist engagements such as Chagall's Homère suite, to contemporary positions by Khalili and Kader Attia that treat migration and border-crossing as lived experience.

Panagopoulos, who divides her life between London and Greece, has described collecting as a journey through questions of identity and belonging. Shaped by her Greek heritage and an interest in how artists navigate cultural and geographic boundaries, her collection reflects both personal experience and wider social concerns — a perspective the exhibition extends to the public for the first time. Other artists in the show include Vlassis Caniaris, Claire Fontaine, Sean Scully and Niki de Saint Phalle.