Nicos Hadjikiriakos Ghika Greek, 1906-1994

Group Exhibition in Support of Cyprus, September 1974

Executed on thick wove paper. The paper is mounted on a board. There are no signs of any tears or damages and apart from some small pinholes to the extreme edges the work is in good overall condition. Held in a simple metal frame painted gold with a wicker slip.
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The present work is a superb example of Ghika's mature style, displaying a highly successful combination of modern and Byzantine art. The intentional rigidity of the walls and columns reveal Ghika's typical kaleidoscopic technique, creating a composition with a complex, almost calligraphic pattern.

By the 1920s European Modernism had opened up a huge variety of aesthetic directions. For Ghika, however, it was the synthetic Cubism of Picasso and Braque that proved decisive. Here he recognised the same principles that underlay the Byzantine art that he cherished: "strictness, the geometric, hierarchy" (in Marina Lambraki-Plaka, ed., Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 139). On this principle he built a uniquely Hellenic form of Cubism that fused traditional Greek heritage with Parisian avant-garde, as exemplified by the present work. By confusing the reading of space, Sundrenched takes on the role of pure representation: the analysis and synthesis of the observer's view of objects in space.