Greece’s newly refurbished National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum in Athens is ready to welcome visitors when epidemiological data allows for the opening of all museums, the Greek Culture Ministry said in a statement issued on Friday.

The emblematic works for the expansion and renovation of the building “impressed visitors and spectators on March 24, in the launch of celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution of 1821,” said the ministry.

When fully open, the public will have the opportunity to see the permanent collection of the National Gallery and works from the interwar period, it added.

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More than 2,000 years ago, Greek artists created bronze sculptures that are as beautiful and expressive as anything made before or since. And they were prolific, molding tens of thousands of gleaming likenesses of civic leaders, poets, gods and heroes.

Only about 200 remain today, which makes the latest exhibit at the National Gallery of Art all the more odds-defying. One quarter of the survivors are on view as part of “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World,” through March 20.

“We’ve brought together as many large-scale bronze sculptures as have ever been brought together before, and the ones we’ve chosen are of the highest order,” says Jens M. Daehner, an antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA, who co-curated the exhibit with the Getty’s Kenneth Lapatin. The exhibit arrives in D.C. after stops in Florence, Italy, and Los Angeles.

Born in Athens in 1944, Kyriakos Katzourakis studied painting at the School of Fine Arts as well as in England at St. Martins School of Art. He also studied stage scenery. In 1968, he was awarded the “Parthenis Prize”. He lived in England from 1972 to 1985, where, with the help of Eduardo Paolotsi and Arts Council, he organised an exhibition of his works at the Serpentine Gallery (1976). He has been working permanently in Greece since 1986. He is founder of the group “5 Young Greek Realists.”

In movies, among other things, Katzourakis was scenographer of Pantelis Voulgaris’s “To proxenio tis Annas” and he also created the costumes for “Days of ‘36” by Theodoros Angelopoulos. Besides “Small Revolts”, he also directed the films “The Way to the West” and “Sweet Memory”. His films are currently being shown at the Benaki Museum.

“When I hear the word crisis, I feel the opponent’s futility,” said Kyriakos Katzourakis. “Obviously, capitalism is suffering a crisis of age and admits it openly, but is it sharing it with common people, instead of sharing its capital?” The director and artist, whose latest film Small Revolts (starring Katia Yerou) was recently screened for the first time, perceives the crisis as a word from the new economic vocabulary that obscures ordinary things. “You hear the word 'crisis’ and you are horrified,” he said, “it defeats you and you feel a terrible shock because of your courage to request a pension, salary, education and care. Who will give you these things, when your boss is in a crisis?”