Michael Petry has unveiled a monumental new painting at the Vorres Museum in Athens. The scale alone announces that something all-encompassing is being attempted. Civil War Painting Number 17, measuring two metres high and ten metres long, was created during a three-week residency at the museum and is now installed at its entrance, visible through a glass façade overlooking a reflective pool. The doubling of the image in the water below is not incidental. Reflection, in every sense, is what this work demands.
Curated by Olga Daniylopoulou, the painting extends Petry’s sustained investigation into political violence, authoritarianism and the visual language of conflict, focusing specifically on what the artist describes as the current American government’s attempts to provoke conditions resembling civil war through militarised occupation and state intimidation. The imagery of masked armed forces demanding identification papers from civilians carries its own historical weight. Petry has spoken about these scenes recalling Berlin in 1939, a comparison that is neither casual nor comfortable, and that the work earns through the seriousness of its formal ambition.
Michael Petey Photo: by Nikos Markou Vorres Museum, Athens
The reference points are handled with care. The most immediate is Picasso’s Guernica, with which CWP#17 shares both its horizontal scale and its anti-war intensity. Petry is not simply invoking Picasso’s authority but entering into a genuine conversation with it, drawing on Greece’s own histories of civil war and military occupation to situate the work within a longer and broader account of what state violence looks like and what art can do in its presence.
The work is also in dialogue with Andy Warhol’s late camouflage paintings, though the distinction Petry draws is significant. Where Warhol’s surfaces were silkscreened, Petry paints every mark by hand, insisting on material presence and painterly labour as values in themselves. That insistence connects the work to the tradition of large-scale immersive painting associated with Monet’s Water Lilies, another point of reference that situates CWP#17 within a history of ambitious pictorial thinking and of political art.
The palette was chosen as a homage to the specific landscape of the Vorres Museum’s setting: ochre earth tones, terracotta reds and the deep blue of the Aegean sky. The work belongs to this place while speaking about another, and that tension between the local and the political produces something more complex than protest alone.
Civil War Painting Number 17 is on view at the Vorres Museum in Athens until the end of June 2026.