Joannis Avramidis

Joannis Avramidis, son of Greek parents, 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 Greece and four years later to Vienna. After the war, Avramidis resumed the studies he had begun in Batumi, now first enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts and in 1953, studying in Fritz Wotruba's class for sculptural art, until 1956. His design vocabulary is based on the depiction of the human body in a reduced way, constructed by basic forms. As early as 1962 Avramidis represented Austria at the Biennale in Venice and also participated at the Documenta in Kassel. From 1968 up until receiving his emeritus status in 1992, he held a professorship in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The Vienna-based artist passed in 2016. Throughout his life the central motif of his artwork has been humankind, specially the human figure – even in his works considered abstract. Based on in-depth studies of Greek Antiquity and the Renaissance theory of proportions, his aim was to find a universally valid representation of the human body. In his quest for the absolute figure, Avramidis reduces organic forms based on self-imposed principles. He understands his art as the construction of an objective, law-governed form whose clarity derives from internal structural order rather than subjective expression. This form is for him the primary requirement for creating artworks. (1) Two important groups of works constitute a particularly noteworthy part of his œuvre: the block-like figures as well as the head sculptures, the latter of which include the present work, dated around 1969/70. In “Head with distant planes I”, he combined various planes to prismatic blocks, reminiscent of archaic archetypes, thereby amplifying their timelessness and elegance. His figures make do without physiognomic differentiation or any form of individualism. They neither show emotion nor grand gestures, but are rather reduced to their sheer existence, their being - not bound to space or time.

(1) Joannis Avramidis, Antworten, in: Joannis Avramidis, Ausstellungskatalog Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover 1967, S. 82