Nikos Kessanlis

In Large Figures, Kessanlis demonstrates his ability to digest the vocabulary of the movements that surrounded him and create a ground-breaking new vocabulary within the Greek canon, phase by phase within his lifetime. The frenzied brushstrokes, impulsive gestures, distorted figures and the artist's use of unusual material like sand encourage comparison to the lyrical abstraction of art informel. The angles and planes of layered figures and objects derive from the formal vocabulary of Cubism, likely assimilated during Kessanlis' time at the School of Fine Art in Athens.

Radical and innovative, Nikos Kessanlis belongs to that generation of Greek artists who were the first to attempt a dynamic change in art, an opening up to the contemporary international scene. A direct participant in European artistic developments starting at the time of the creation of Large Figures, Kessanlis, through his work, has renewed the discourse of the Greek visual arts.

Originally from Thessaloniki, Kessanlis settled in Athens to study at the School of Fine Arts and work in Yannis Moralis', Yannis Spyropoulos' and Nikos Nikolaou's workshops. He went to Rome in 1955 to study at the Italian Institute of Athens, specifically to study art restoration at the Instituto del Restauro. In 1961 Kessanlis moved to Paris and began a close association with the New Realists and the theoretician Pierre Restany, relationships that engendered his use of objets trouvés in his work. After developing his visual repertoire through photo-mechanical reproduction, the compositional deconstruction of photographs and finally the picturesque interpretation of his personal mythology, Kessanlis represented Greece in the 1988 Venice Biennale.