This spring, Onassis Stegi opens its doors to a side of Yorgos Lanthimos that audiences in Greece have never seen before. From March 7 to May 17, 2026, the European premiere of Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs marks the first time the internationally celebrated director, producer and screenwriter presents a major photography exhibition in his home country – offering a fresh lens on one of contemporary cinema’s most singular voices.

Widely known for films such as Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), The Favourite (2018), and Poor Things (2023), Lanthimos has built a reputation for constructing strange, meticulously controlled worlds and for probing human relationships with dark humor and unsettling precision. This exhibition extends that sensibility into still images, bringing together four bodies of work comprising 182 photographs taken over the past five years and revealing how photography has become a parallel, more intuitive practice alongside his filmmaking.

“Taking photos has become an important thing in my life other than filmmaking, it is so much freer. It feels like there are fewer rules tied to conventional narrative,” muses Lanthimos.

Three of the four bodies of work emerge from the margins of his film sets. Shot in New Orleans, Atlanta, and on the soundstages of Budapest, these images capture the eerie in-betweens of cinema: deserted streets, artificial cities, fragments of constructed realities. Many of the photographs appear in his recent books, including 2024’s Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken (made during the filming of Poor Things) and i shall sing these songs beautifully, created alongside Kinds of Kindness. The exhibition also features previously unseen material from the set of his most recent feature film Bugonia, released in 2025.

The fourth body of work is the most intimate and perhaps the most surprising: an ongoing series of personal photographs taken in Greece. Wandering alone on the edges of Athens and across islands in the Aegean Sea, Lanthimos turns his attention to the everyday – empty lots, stray structures, quiet corners of familiar landscapes. The result is meditative and quietly abstract, transforming the mundane into something charged with ambiguity and presence.

Curated by Michael Mack, founder of the award-winning publishing house MACK, and commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi, the exhibition is designed like a classical Greek temple. A central, altar-like space presents 110 new works, while the perimeter guides visitors through three film-related series, moving from the director’s recognizable cinematic universe toward a more inward-looking photographic language.

“Yorgos Lanthimos is a singular talent in the use of a camera lens to build narratives, and this exhibition establishes his flourishing capacity to elicit emotional and intellectual leaps of faith beyond the frame of a still photograph,” comments Mack. “The ongoing series of black-and-white works made in Greece away from his filmmaking practice mark a new departure, a turning inwards to a known landscape. Emerging within a long tradition of photography applied to document the man-altered landscape, it also reflects an era of self-reflection and of his advanced progress in developing his own language in photography,”

To coincide with the opening, Lanthimos will also launch his new photobook viscin (2026).

Whether you know Lanthimos for his unsettling cinematic worlds or are curious to encounter his quieter, more contemplative side, this exhibition offers a rare chance to see how one of Greece’s most internationally recognized auteurs thinks in images when the camera finally stops rolling.