Joannis Avramidis

Joannis Avramidis was born in 1922 in Batum (today's Batumi in Georgia) where he studied at the public art school for painting and graphic art. In 1939 he and his family emigrated to Athens and in 1943 he came to Vienna as a foreign worker. After the war, he first studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and in 1953, in Fritz Wotruba's (another famous Austrian sculptor) class for sculptural art, until 1956. His design vocabulary is the depiction of the human body in a reduced way, constructed by basic forms. In interviews he often mentions the connection to the tradition of antique art or its reception in the Renaissance, from which he drew inspiration. His earlier works "Torso", made in bronze already show his fondness of column-like upright sculptures, with superimposed segments. Joannis Avramidis' sculptures reduce bodies and remove movement, to expose the most basic elements. And yet the figures are not rigid, but are filled with a 'rhythm of austerity', as Werner Hoffmann called it. The core element of Avramidis' work is the human body, although abstracted the voluminous forms of the individual body parts are clearly visible.