Contemporary Greek art

Last updated

Contemporary Greek art is defined as the art produced by Greek artists after World War II.

Contents

Painting-Sculpture

Abstract Expressionism

Theodoros Stamos (1922-1997) was an acclaimed abstract expressionist artist from Lefkas, who lived and worked in New York in the 1940s and 50s. His work has been exhibited throughout the world, and can be found in major museum collections such as the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. [1]

Dimitris Koukos (1948-) is also considered as a leading expressionist painter, mainly renowned for his abstract work and landscapes. Koukos has had over 30 one man exhibitions and participated in several group exhibitions in Athens, Paris, Boston, and Moscow. The artist's works can be found in private collections in the U.S., France, Italy, U.K. as well as at the National Gallery in Athens, the Pieridis Museum, the Vorres Museum, the Cultural Institute of the National Bank of Greece, the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education in Cyprus.

Kinetic Art

Takis was born in 1925 in Athens, and is an internationally acclaimed self-taught sculptor. He travelled, worked exhibited in Athens, Paris, London, New York and in many other cities. He is particularly known for his telemagnetic sculpture that formed the basis of his aesthetic expression and his musical sculptures. Takis' musical sculptures are based on the simple concept of using magnetic waves caused by electricity as a means to activate repeated musical sounds: the latter are to be heard every time a needle strikes a string, when attracted by a magnet. He won the Grand Prize at the Paris New Biennale in 1985. An illustrative example would be the installation of a real forest of numerous Signs in the Place de la Defence in Paris (1984–87), the original and imaginative illumination of the Arc de Triomphe at the same period, the transformation of the aqueduct at Beauvais into a musical tower with a network of vertical metallic strings, in 1992, and his design for the layout of a subway station in Toulouse in 1993. Takis' non-morphological inquiries have continued through successive rejections of representationalism; his method and the acoustic sensations which it calls forth retain their austerity. These are the features which place his artistic inventions among the most important achievements of contemporary, post-World War II art. [2]

Arte povera

In Arte povera, artists use any medium they could get for free or very, very cheap. The main Greek representative of arte povera is Jannis Kounellis, who introduced found objects in his paintings, such as live animals but also fire, earth, burlap sacks, gold. He replaced the canvas with bed frames, doorways, windows or simply the gallery itself. [3]

Stuckism

Stuckism is an international artistic movement that was created as a reaction to conceptual art. Stuckist painter Odysseus Yakoumakis in September 2004,founded the first Greek group of Stuckism International named The Romantic Anonymous Fellowship to oppose to the provinciality of the mainstream contemporary Greek art and in particular post-modernism. [4]

Performance Art

Leda Papaconstantinou is known on the Greek art scene as a pioneer in the fields of performance art. After beginning her studies in Greece, she continued in England from 1967 to 1971 at the Loughton College of Art then at the Kent Institute of Art and Design. Her first performance films, shot in Super 8 in 1969, show a remarkable aptitude at combining bodily language and the language of experimental cinema and materials (Oh Godard – Celebrating Godard, Self Portrait, 1969). In her films, she and other artist collaborators (Sally Potter, Stuart Brisley, Marc Camille Chaimowicz) accomplish series of intensely dramatic actions in very intricate visual installations. Inspired by Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet’s theatre, to which she devoted two pieces, she uses the body to represent the coalition of antithetical elements, such as feminine/masculine, nature/art, memory/subconscious, eros/thanatos, historical time/present time. [5]

Georgia Sagri is an artist and a founding organizer of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Georgia Sagri's social activism (alongside her artistic activities) dates back to 1997, when she was a member of the Void Network in Athens. Sagri has organized the perambulatory curatorial project Saloon and the audio-only magazine Forté since 2009. In 2013 she initiated the semi-public and semi-personal space [matter]HYLE in Athens, with the mission to develop a new model for the contemporary work-life structure. She has exhibited and participated in documenta 14 (2017), Manifesta 11 (2016), Istanbul Biennial (2015), La biennale de Lyon (2013), Whitney Biennial (2012), Thessaloniki Biennale (2011), and the Athens Biennale (2007). [6]

Mary Zygouri addresses issues related to individual identity and social crisis in the contemporary world. In her work she invents and impersonates fictional characters in reality, false identities presented in public actions and video-performances with symbolic and paradoxical results. She focuses on the notion of self in relation to systems of power, censorship, and surveillance. Starting from historical events, investigating archives, biographies, and literary narratives, she alters the past and its many interpretations, by transferring, re-signifying, and representing them in contemporary frames of reference, relocating them in contemporary reality. [7]

FYTA are a Greek performance-art duo who curate regular art events as well as producing their own artefacts. They participated in the 4th and 6th Athens Biennale and are described as "far from a fringe group in the Greek art world". [8]

Digital Art

Miltos Manetas is an artist who makes paintings, videoworks, prints and performances about video games, players and computer hardware. [9] [10]

Andreas Angelidakis is an architect and artist working at the intersection of digital culture and architectural production. He is one of the first artists who treated the internet as a real place, a site where he designed and built online communities such as the Chelsea Project and Neen World. He also designed and built spaces, intended to appear as computer renderings, sparking a discussion as to whether they were ever built (Pause pavilion, Stockholm 2002) and spaces that included a garden of mummified plants used as a virtual horizon for a laser beauty clinic (Forever Laser, Geneva 1998 and 2003). [11] Angelidakis has realized projects in Sweden, Switzerland, United States and Italy for publications, museums and cultural foundations. [12]

Lydia Venieri [13] although known as painter and mixed media sculptor started doing internet art in 1994 [14] with her showing of Fin at the FIAC95. This was followed by Her Story, Apology (addressed to the artist Takis). Her last digital work Moonlight was released in 2008 for the iPhone.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arte Povera</span> Italian art movement

Arte Povera was an art movement that took place between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s in major cities throughout Italy and above all in Turin. Other cities where the movement was also important are Milan, Rome, Genoa, Venice, Naples and Bologna. The term was coined by Italian art critic Germano Celant in 1967 and introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jannis Kounellis</span> Greek artist

Jannis Kounellis was a Greek Italian artist based in Rome. A key figure associated with Arte Povera, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.

Lydia Venieri is a Greek artist.

Germano Celant was an Italian art historian, critic, and curator who coined the term "Arte Povera" in the 1967 Flash Art piece "Appunti Per Una Guerriglia", which would become the manifesto for the Arte Povera artistic and political movement. He wrote many articles and books on the subject.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nikos Engonopoulos</span> Greek painter and poet

Nikos Egonopoulos was a Greek painter and poet. He is one of the most important members of "Generation of the '30s", as well as a major representative of the surrealist movement in Greece. His work as a writer also includes critique and essays.

<i>Flash Art</i> Italian art magazine

Flash Art is a contemporary art magazine, and an Italian and international publishing house. Originally published bilingually, both in Italian and in English, since 1978 is published in two separate editions, Flash Art Italia (Italian) and Flash Art International (English). Since September 2020, the magazine is seasonal, and said editions are published four times a year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modern Greek art</span>

Modern Greek art is art from the period between the emergence of the new independent Greek state and the 20th century. As Mainland Greece was under Ottoman rule for all four centuries, it was not a part of the Renaissance and artistic movements that followed in Western Europe. However, Greek islands such as Crete, and the Ionian islands in particular were for large periods under Venetian or other European powers' rule and thus were able to better assimilate the radical artistic changes that were occurring in Europe during the 14th-18th century.

Miltos Manetas is a Greek painter and multimedia artist. He currently lives and works in Bogotá.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Iolas</span> Greek-American art collector (1908–1987)

Alexander Iolas was an Egyptian-born Greek-American art gallerist and significant collector of modern art works, who advanced the careers of René Magritte, Andy Warhol and many other artists. He established the modern model of the global art business, operating successful galleries in Paris, Geneva, Milan and New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of Contemporary Art Andros</span> Museum located in Andros, Greece

The Museum of Contemporary Art Andros is a museum located in Andros, Greece.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michelangelo Pistoletto</span> Italian artist, painter and sculptor

Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera. His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Denys Zacharopoulos is an art historian and theorist. He works as Professor of Art History, author, and curator, amongst others at the 48th Biennale in Venice (Italy) and documenta IX in Kassel (Germany).

Countess Adelina von Fürstenberg-Herdringen is a Swiss curator specialized in contemporary art. Von Fürstenberg was one of the first curators to show an interest in non-European artists, thus opening the way for a multicultural approach in art. She also took a more global and flexible approach to contemporary art exhibitions, in bringing art into spaces such as monasteries, madrasas, large public buildings, squares, islands, and parks. Her objective is to give a larger context for visual art in making it a more vigorous part of our lives, in creating a more vivid dialogue for it with other arts, and relating it more to worldwide social issues.

Marisa Merz was an Italian artist and sculptor. In the 1960s, Merz was the only female protagonist associated with the radical Arte povera movement. In 2013 she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. She lived and worked in Turin, Italy.

ART for The World is a non-governmental organization (NGO) associated with the United Nations Department of Public Information (UNDPI). It is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and since 2005 has collaborated with its sister association ART for The World Europa, based in Milan, Italy. In 1995, Adelina von Fürstenberg founded ART for The World within Dialogues de Paix, an international contemporary art exhibition which she curated on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.

Tatjana Ilic – Tanja Ilic is a fine artist. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts – Majoring in graphics in Belgrade in 1995. During her studies she enrolled at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy in the class of Jannis Kounellis, section Bildhauerei. On the recommendation of her professor, she acquired a Master's status in 1997, and continued to work in the same class until 2000. She has been a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia since 1995. She has also been a member of the International Artists Forum since 2003. In the same year her artwork "Vogel" was incorporated into the analytical review "Performance – Art – Kontext".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Antonakos</span> American sculptor (1926–2013)

Stephen Antonakos was a Greek born American sculptor most well known for his abstract sculptures often incorporating neon.

Athanasios Argianas is a Greek and British artist living and working in London, England. Argianas' practice is interdisciplinary; incorporating sculpture, painting, text, performance and often music or sound, and concerns itself with metaphorical or translated representations of aural experiences. He received his MA from Goldsmiths College, London and previously studied under Jannis Kounellis at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Matteo Montani is a contemporary Italian painter and sculptor born in Rome in 1972.

References

  1. Theodoros Stamos
  2. takis Archived 2007-08-21 at the Wayback Machine
  3. Jannis Kounellis: the metamorphoses of Apollo
  4. "50 cent bingo book cd at odysseus-art.net". Archived from the original on 2007-03-11. Retrieved 2007-07-27.
  5. Strousa, Efi (2013). "Aware Women Artists: Leda Papaconstantinou". Aware Women Artists. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  6. MIT PRESS (2018). "MIT PRESS: GEORGIA SAGRI". Georgia Sagri. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  7. "documenta 14: Mary Zygouri". www.documenta14.com. 2018. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  8. Dimitrakaki, Angela (2019). "Anti-fascism/Art/Theory". Third Text. 33 (3): 271–292. doi: 10.1080/09528822.2019.1663679 . S2CID   203051296.
  9. Miltos Manetas artist and art...the-artists.org Archived 2007-09-30 at the Wayback Machine
  10. "Untitled Document". Archived from the original on 2007-08-02. Retrieved 2007-07-27.
  11. "Andreas Angelidakis". www.angelidakis.com. Retrieved 5 February 2024.
  12. Andreas Angelidakis | DLD Conference Archived 2007-10-08 at the Wayback Machine
  13. Nadja Argyropoulou; Anastasia Aukeman; Lydia Venieri (2011). Lydia Venieri: Theogony. Charta. ISBN   978-88-8158-792-6.
  14. What's New: March 1995

Bibliography