Caniaris 2014 portfolio

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THE BREEDER 45 Iasonos st, GR 10436, Athens, t/f: +30 210 33 17 527, [email protected] 1 rue des Lilas, MC 98000, Monaco, t: +377 97987990, [email protected] www.thebreedersystem.com

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!!!!!!!VLASSIS CANIARIS PORTFOLIO

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Vlassis Caniaris, Observer, 1980 / 2005, mixed media, 140x60x60 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, installation view at The Breeder Monaco

Vlassis Caniaris, Torso with Belt, 1970, mixed media, 100x40x30cm.

Vlassis Caniaris, Without Words, 1973, mixed media, 80x50x150cm.

Vlassis Caniaris, Stop, 1974, mixed media installation, 175x200x130cm.""

Vlassis Caniaris, Angel, 2009, mixed media, 145x60x30cm

Vlassis Caniaris Space Within Space

1960 mixed media

170x100x7cm

Vlassis Caniaris, installation view at The Breeder Monaco.

Vlassis Caniaris, What does the future hold?, 1983, mixed media, 180x50x50 cm

Vlassis Caniaris

Marchons tous unis... 1963

mixed media 200x115x55cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Marchons tous unis..., 1963, mixed media, 200x115x55 cm back view

Vlassis Caniaris Marchons tous unis...

1963 detail view

mixed media 200x115x55 cm

Vlassis Caniaris Garbage Child

1974 mixed media 95x38x30 cm

Vlassis Caniaris Garbage Child


Vlassis Caniaris, Probable Architecture, installation view at The Breeder Monaco, 2013.

Vlassis Caniaris Probable Architecture


Vlassis Caniaris Probable Architecture

1965 mixed media

27x15x12.5 cm !

Vlassis Caniaris, Space within Space, 1963, mixed media, 198x160x23cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Youngster, 1974, mixed media, 170x55x70 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Back and Forth, 1962, Mixed media, 170x80x35cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Recollection of a Coexistence, 1963, mixed media, 150x45x45cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Education Physique III, 1965, mixed media, 175x75x45 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Recollection of a Coexistence, 1963, mixed media, 150x45x45cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Education Physique III, 1965, mixed media, 175x75x45 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Without Words, 1973, mixed media, 30x41x53 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Stop, 1974, mixed media, 175x200x130 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Stop, 1974, detail view, mixed media, 175x200x130 cm

Vlassis Caniaris Space Within Space

1960

mixed media

170x100x7 cm

Vlassis Caniaris

Untitled

1963 mixed media

100x50x15 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Boudoir, 1974, installation view at Art Basel 2010, under the auspices of The Breeder

Vlassis Caniaris, Boudoir, 1974, mixed media, 250 x 510 x 280 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Boudoir, 1974, detail view, mixed media, 250 x 510 x 280 cm

Installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, 2012.

Back and Forth, 1962, Mixed Media 170 x 80 x35 cm, Athens (Zorro), 1956 Oil on canvas 69 x 95 cm installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton

at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, 2012.

Untitled (Girl’s figurine), 2004 Mixed media, 120 x 45 x 20 cm, Garbage child, 1974 Mixed media, 93 x 29 x 49 cm , installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo

exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, 2012.

Possible Background, 1974 Mixed media installation, Dimensions variable, installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, 2012.

5 x Probable Architecture, 1965, Mixed media between 16 x 17 x 17 cm and 47 x 25 x 14 cm, installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, 2012

Perspective, 1971 Mixed Media, 106 x 90 x 92 cm, installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen,

2012.

Observer of History, 2006, Mixed media 122 x 36 x 40 cm ,installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst

Bremen, 2012.

Coexistence, 1964, Mixed Media, 29 x 32 x 25 cm, installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen,

2012.

Only this, 1962 Mixed Media 35 x 35 x 30 cm, installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, 2012.

Child’s Room, 1974 Mixed media installation 150 x 250 x 160 cm, installation view at Vlassis Caniaris solo exhibiton at the GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, 2012.

Vlassis Caniaris, The Big Swing, 1973, mixed media, 330x410x150 cm,

installation view at the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennial, A Rock and a Hard Place, 2011,

curated by Paolo Colombo, Mahita El Bacha Urieta, Marina Fokidis

Vlassis Caniaris, Composition, 1974, Institute exhibition, Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, 2012

Vlassis Caniaris, Space within Space, 1963, mixed media, 198x160x23cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Urinals of History, 1980, mixed media, 150x50x60cm and

175x50x65cm, installation view MIET Foundation, Athens

Vlassis Caniaris, Small Cradle, 1974, mixed media, 16x85x50 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Bicycle, 1974, mixed media, 70x250x160 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Tourist, 1974, mixed media, 150x200x130 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Tourist, 1974, detail view, mixed media, 150x200x130 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Interior, 1974, mixed media, 200x160x300 cm

Vlassis Caniaris, Sculptures 1973-1974, solo exhibition at Team Gallery, New York, 2011

Vlassis Caniaris, Sculptures 1973-1974, solo exhibition at Team Gallery, New

York, 2011

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Vlassis!Caniaris,!Untitled,!1980,!mixed!media!on!canvas,!2.50!x!10!m!

Vlassis Caniaris, Untitled, 1980, mixed media on canvas, 2.50 x 10 m, installation view at The Breeder, 2009

!Vlassis!Caniaris,!Antidoro,!installation!view!of!reverse!side!of!painting!before!the!event,!The!Breeder,!Athens,!2009!

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Vlassis!Caniaris,!«Antidoro»,!5!November!2009,!The!Breeder,!Athens.!

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Vlassis!Caniaris,!«Antidoro»,!5!November!2009,!The!Breeder,!Athens.!!

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Vlassis Caniaris Biography Born in Athens, 1928. Passed away in Athens, March 3rd 2011. Lived in Rome 1956 – 60 Lived in Paris 1960 – 1971 Lived in Berlin 1973 – 75 Lived in Athens 1976 -2011

Distinctions

Elected to the Chair of Painting at the Architectural School of the National Technical University, Athens,

Greece 1976 – 96

Education

1959 School of Fine Arts, Rome

1950 – 1955 School of Fine Arts, Athens, Greece (studios of Umbertos Argyros, Yiannis Pappas, Panos Sarafianos & Yiannis Moralis)

1946 – 1950 University of Athens, School of Medicine, Greece

Public Collections

Tate Modern Collection, London

Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris

Karl Enst Osthaus- Museum, Hagen

SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium

Musée d'Art moderne de Saint-Etienne Saint-Etienne France

National Art Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens

National Museum of Contemporary Art - EMST Athens

MMCA Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki

The Vorres Museum, Athens

Pieridis Museum, Athens

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Alpha Credit Bank Collection, Greece

Solo shows

2013 The Breeder Monaco, Monaco 2012 GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen Institute exhibition, Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds 2011 Sculptures 1973-1974, Team Gallery, New York 2010 As it was before the day before yesterday so it will be the day after the day after tomorrow, Giti Nourbakhsch Gallery, Berlin 2009 Antidoro, The Breeder, Athens Genethlion, Arnados School, Tinos, Greece Arrivederci-Willkommen, Kalfayan Gallery, Athens 2008 Anniversary, Benaki Museum, Athens 2004 Municipal Art Gallery of Chania, Crete, Greece «Zina Anastasiadou» gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece 2003 Foundation for Hellenic Culture, New York 2000 State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, retrospective «Zina Anastasiadou» gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece 1999 National Gallery, Athens, retrospective 1996 «Aria» gallery, Argostoli, Kefalonia island, Greece 1994 «Galerie 3», Athens 1992 Staatliche Kunsthaus, Berlin 1991

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Cultural Center Vafopoulou, Thessaloniki, Greece «Paratiritis» gallery, Thessaloniki Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Hagen 1989 «Titanium» gallery, Athens Municipal Gallery, Patras 1988 43rd Venice Biennale, Greek Pavillion Geni Tzami, Thessaloniki, Greece 1983 Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund 1981 Galerie im Traklhaus, Saltzburg Galerie «Bama», Paris 1980 «Bernier» arts center, Athens «Bernier» gallery, Athens 1976 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London Hannover Kunstverein, Hannover 1975 Gallery of the Twentieth Century, Berlin Kunstverein Heidelberg, Heidelberg Kunstverein Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt Museum Bochum, Bochum 1974 Galleria «Bocchi», Milan 1972 Galerie «Poll», Berlin Galerie «Bauer&Pietschner», Bochum 1971 Moderna Museet, Stockholm 1970 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, ARC2, Paris Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture, Champigny Galerie «Fitzroy», Brussels 1969 «New Gallery», Athens 1967

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«Prado de l’Ateneo», Madrid 1964 Galerie «J», Paris Galerie «Florence Houston Brown», Paris «Teatro la Fenice», Venice 1963 Galerie «Le Zodiaque», Brussels 1962 Galleria «Cadario», Milan 1960 Galleria «La Tartaruga», Rome 1958 «Zygos» gallery, Athens Group shows

2013 «The Encyclopedic Palace», 55th Venice Biennial, Arsenale, Venice, curated by Massimiliano Gioni Hell As Pavillion, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, curated by Nadia Argyropoulou 2011 A Rock and A Hard Place, 3rd Thessaloniki Biennial, Thessaloniki, curated by Paolo Colombo, Mahita El Bacha Urieta, Marina Fokidis Greek Art, SEM-Art Gallery, Monaco Ντέρτι Humanism, Faggionato Fine Arts, London, curated by Nadia Argyropoulou 2010 The Marathon Marathon, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Nadia Argyropoulou, Acropolis Museum, Athens 2009 Vlassis Caniaris. In Contrapunto, ITYS, Institute of Contemporart Art and Thought, Athens 2007-8 Greek artists in Germany and German artists in Greece; curated by N. Kyriazi, Municipal arts gallery of Athens, Athens 2006 Projekt Migration; team curatorship, Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne The Grand Promenade; curated by A. Kafetsi, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens The Alpha Bank Collection, Greek Artist since 1920, MMCA, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Flowers in Contemporary Art – Benaki Museum, Athens 2005 The years of defiance: The Art of the 70s in Greece; curated by Bia Papadopoulou, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens

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2014 10th Gwangju Biennale. Burning Down the House, curated by Jessica Morgan, Gwangju, Korea

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The Art of Greece meets China, Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing A Glance at Greek Postwar Art, Kalfayan Galleries, Thessaloniki 2004 Exercises; Zina Athanassiadou gallery, Thessaloniki, pref. Marina Athanassiadou Historical Reflections; curated by M. Stefanidis, Sarantopoulos Flour Mills, Piraeus In and Out: Notes on the 1960’s, from Beltsios collection; American-Hellenic Union, Athens, pref. M. Stefanidis Vlassis Caniaris: Passages 1957-2004; curated by M. Kasimatis, Municipal Art Gallery of Chania, Crete, Greece 2003 Place and Form: Works from the Paraskeva collection; curated by Denys Zacharopoulos, Museum of the city of Athens, Athens Whatever the People Want...; curated by M. Stefanidis, Hellenic Foundation for Culture, Oct-Nov, New York On, inaugural show, galeries Xippas, Athens Acquisitions 2001-2002, Paintings and installations, National Museum of Contemporary Art, EMST, Athens 2002 The ‘70’s Shock; curated by Manos Pavlides, To Milo, Athens Schritte in andere weiten, KEOM Karl Enst Osthaus Museum, Hagen 2001 Glossalgia; curated by M. Stefanides and N. Argyropoulou, Hellenic American Union, Frissiras Museum, Athens 2000 Vlassis Caniaris – Retrospective; curated by M. Papanikolaou, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Vlassis Caniaris; «Zina Athanassiadou» gallery, January, Thessaloniki, pref. M. Stefanidis On Your Hands You Walk; Galerie «Kubus», March, Hanover 1999 Vlassis Caniaris – Retrospective; curated by A. Kafetsi, National Gallery, Athens Banner, Flag, Point; Psyhari gallery, pref. E. Savvani Minus-Plus; Hellenic American Union, Athens, pref. M. Stefanides, N. Argyropoulou 1998 Teachers and pupils. A reading proposal; «Metamorphosis» gallery, Thessaloniki, pref. M. Stefanides 1997 Teachers and pupils; «Astrolavos» gallery, pref. M. Stefanides 1996 Vlassis Caniaris; «Aria» gallery, Argostoli, Kefallonia island About Homeland; House of Cyprus, Athens, pref. M. Stefanides Facing History, 1993 – 1996; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1995 Caniaris; Galerie «3», Art Athina, Athens.

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1994 Caniaris; Galerie «3», Athens, pref. M. Stefanides 1993 The Child in Modern Greek Art; National Gallery, Athens, pref. A. Kouria, E. Orati 1992 Vlassis Caniaris, My Children; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Staatlische Kunsthalle, Berlin The Open Image. Aspects of Modern Art in Europe after 1945; Westfalisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster Transformations of Modern: The greek experience; National Gallery, Athens, pref. A. Kafetsi 1991 Caniaris; Vafopoulou Cultural Centre, April – May, Thessaloniki, pref. M. Papanikolaou Caniaris; Observer gallery, Thessaloniki Open Box; Karl-Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Hagen Painting Exhibition; Eugenides Foundation, Athens. 21 "What now"; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin Urban Dreams; twenty-four gallery, Athens Hellenic American Union, Athens XV Biennale Internazionale del Bronzetto; Padova International Summer Academy; Saltzburg 1990 15 years – Amnesty International in Greece; House of Cyprus, Athens, pref. Al. Xidis On the Verge of the ‘80s-‘90s; Municipal gallery of Athens, Athens, pref. M. Stefanides A Glance on Contemporary Greek Art; Dallas, Texas, pref. N, Iliopoulou-Rogan. 1989 Vlassis Caniaris, 1956-1959, Anaphora-Epanaphora; Titanium gallery, Athens Municipal gallery of Patras 1988 Vlassis Caniaris, Greece; Venice Biennale XLIII, Venice, pref. Emm. Mavromatis. Vlassis Caniaris, Geni Tzami; State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, pref. Emm. Mavromatis. European Cultural Centre of Delfoi, pref. N, Iliopoulou-Rogan. Art Symposium, Crete. 1987 In Search of New Materials and Media; Apopsi gallery, Athens, pref. E. Strouza. Prizewinning Works from the Athens School of Fine Arts Collection; July, Athens Contemporary Greek Painting; National Gallery, Summer, Athens. 1986 Post-war Art in Greece; March-May, Athens, pref. E. Vakalo Athens in Berlin; D.A.A.D. – Pierides gallery, Athens, pref. Wieland Schmied. 1985 Introduction to Contemporary Greek Art; Municipal Gallery, Rhodes, pref. Emm. Mavromatis. After Abstraction; Nees Morfes gallery, Athens, pref. E. Vakalo

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Introductory Chapters to Greek Contemporary Art, by Emm. Mavromatis: Greek artists in France. 1960: Material and Gesture, System and Meaning, 1980: Historical Summaries, Publ. By the Municipal Gallery of Rhodes. 1984 Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund. Exchanges: French Artists in Berlin 1964 -1984; Goethe Institute, Paris Society for Macedonian Studies, Thessaloniki. 1983 Vlassis Caniaris; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, pref. Eugen Thieman & Michael Fehr Europalia 82; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels Art and Dictature - Europalia Hellas; Brussels Greeks and Germans, Images from Others; Württembergisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart 1981 Culture in the Migration Process; Kemnade International VII, Bochum, pref. Michael Fehr International Summer Academy; Saltzburg Environment – Action; Society of Greek Art Critics, Athens Abstraction, Nees Morfes gallery, December, Athens Documentation, Immigrant Culture; Museum Bochum, June, Bochum 1980 Vlassis Caniaris; Bernier gallery, Athens 1979 Is There Any Meaning in Art?; seminar, Goethe Institut, Athens 1978 Tribute to Greek Realism; Society for Studies, Athens, pref. M. Kotzamani Art of the Twentieth Century privately owned in Berlin, Berlin Greek Art Images; Zappeion, Athens, pref. Emm. Mavromatis Show for Greek Contemporary Art; Budapest. 1977 Documenta 6; Kassel Boxes – ARC 2; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris Woman in Resistance; Cultural Centre of the Municipality of Athens Art and Society; Goethe Institut, Athens. Systawa Wisproczesnes Sztuki Greckies, Warsaw HAP Grieshaber; Kunsthalle, Berlin Ypothesis for the Museum of Contemporary Art; «Desmos» gallery, Athens. 1976 Vlassis Canaiaris, "Immigrants"; Institute of Contemporary Arts, pref. Norman Rosenthal, London Shoe Factories; Kunsthalle am Marientor Vlassis Caniaris; Kunstverein Hannover Panorama Of Greek Painting of the Last Twenty-Five Years; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund 1975 Vlassis Caniaris; Berlin, pref. K. Ruhrberg, Lothar Romain & M. Niolinakos

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10 Years of the Berlin Art Program; D.A.A.D., Berlin Eight Artists, Eight Attitudes, Eight Greeks; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, pref. Norman Rosenthal & C. Ioakimides The Greek Month in London; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London For Cyprus; Galerie Palais, Paris We Are Still There, "Kemnade 75 International"; Museum Bochum 1974 Free Berlin Art; Berlin Multiples; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin Art 5 ’74; Galleria «Giancarlo Bocchi», Milan The Idea of the Resistance in Contemporary European Art; Sale e Scuderie di Villa Manzoni, Lecco 1973 Free Berlin Art; Berlin 30 International Künstler in Berlin; Beethoven Halle, Bonn, pref. K. Ruhrberg, Ronald Wiegenstein & Jürgen Harten 1972 Vlassis Caniaris; Galerie «Poll», Berlin 1971 Caniaris, Rutault, Takis, Télémaque, Titus, Caarmel, Vostel; Galerie «Barma», Paris Elefteria; Royal Albert Hall, London VI. Caniaris: "Grekiskt vittnesml/Greek Testimony"; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, pref. G. Gassiot-Talabot & Pierre Restany Paintings and Objects; Musée Galliera, Paris Intox; Maison de la Culture, Grenoble Mutations, Forms, Languages, Behaviours; Musée d’Art Moderne, Ceret May Salon; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris Great Names of Today and Tomorrow; Sale in Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Paris

1970 Vlassis Caniaris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris Caniaris Sculptures; Maison de Jeunes Youri Gagarine, Champigny Art and Politics; March, Karlsruhe Caniaris; Galerie «Fitzroy», Brussels, pref. J. Dypreau, Aspects of Racism; Paris, pref. J. M. Poinsot & A. Pacquement

1969 Caniaris; New Gallery 7, Athens

1967 Contemporary Hellenic Art; Musée Rath, pref. P. Karavias, Geneva 9th Greek Exhibit; Zappeion, Athens. Caniaris – Danil; Sala de Prado de l’Ateneo de Madrid, pref. T. Spiteris

1966 Small Form; «Merlin» gallery, Athens.

1965 Biennale di San Paolo; San Paolo

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1964 Caniaris; Gallery «J», Paris Three Proposals for a New Greek Sculpture, Caniaris – Danil – Nikos; La Fenice, Venice, pref. P. Restany

1963 Caniaris, Contos, Pavlos, Tsoclis; House of Fine Arts and Culture, Athens, pref. T. Spiteris Caniaris; Galerie «Le Zodiaque», pref. Pierre Restany, Brussels IV Biennale of Art Beyond the Informel, Republica di San Marino

1962 Greek Paintings and Sculptures in Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris Caniaris, Nikos; Galleria «Cadario», pref. T. Spiteris, Milan

1961 The New European School; Hessenhuis, Anvers Caniaris, Coulentianos, Gaïtis, Molfessis, Nikos, Philolaos, Prassinos, Touyas; Galerie «Saint-Germain», pref. Yvon Tailandier, Paris Comparisons; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 50 Artists of the Sixteenth Salon of New Realities from Paris; Drian Galleries, London The New European School; «Galerie Kasper», Lausanne International Painting «Wolframs - Eschenbach»; Stadt Wolframs-Eschenbach, pref. W. Grohmann Ars Viva; Tentoonstelling Kultureel Centrum, Malines, pref. W. Volkaert

1959 Modern Greek Art; Galerie «R. Creuze», pref. A. Prokopiou, Paris Caniaris, Condos, Gaïtis, Nikos, Tsoclis; Galleria «San Carlo», pref. L. Castellano, Naples Abstract Painting from Paris; Galerie «Am Doon», Frankfurt, pref. H.G. Carles. Abstract Painting from Paris; Galerie «Günar», pref. H. G. Carles, Dusseldorf Caniaris; Galleria «La Tartaruga, Rome Caniaris; Condos, Gaïtis, Nikos, Tsoclis, «Il Cancello», Bologna Appearances; Mostra Internazionale di Arte Astratta, Florence Galleria «Numero»; Florence Bogart, Caniaris, Mihailovich, Miotte, Pierrakos; Galerie «A.G.», Paris, pref. H. G. Carles Works in a Small Form; Galleria «La Tartaruga», Rome Greek Arts Exhibit; Zappeion, Athens

1958 Vlassis Caniaris; «Zygos»gallery, Athens, pref. J. Recupero The war; «Kouros» gallery, June, Athens Modern Art Exhibit; «Kouros» galleryAthens 1952 Greek Arts Exhibit; Zappeion, Athens.

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Vlassis Caniaris, Solo Exhibition at GAK

http://www.gak-bremen.de/index.php?id=983

VLASSIS CANIARIS Opening: Friday, 28 September, 7 p.m. 29 September 2012 - 6 January 2013

In his Greek homeland, Vlassis Caniaris (1928-2011) ranks among the most

widely known artists of his generation. In 1958, he presented the first exhibition of abstract paintings to be held there, and adopted a critical position

on political and social issues in his work throughout the country’s military dictatorship. Beyond the borders of his home country, Caniaris is frequently viewed as an “artist’s artist”: while his work is known among and appraised among international artists, he has been almost forgotten by the wider art

world after his major international exhibitions between the 1960s and 1990s. Following his death in 2011, the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst is to

stage the first solo-exhibition of works by this remarkable artist outside Greece since 1992, initiating a long overdue process of rediscovery.

Caniaris’ work is classically European and reveals his tremendous artistic

development both in terms of its formal aspects and thematic diversity. Striking out on his own from the 1950s onward, Caniaris explored the aesthetic concerns of European art from an independent perspective, achieving very different results to his contemporaries (such as Robert

Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, or Cy Twombly). While living in Rome (1956-1960), he yet focussed his practice on two-dimensional images, drawing

inspiration from the works of Giorgio de Chirico and symbolic realism. His turn towards the abstract dates to his time in Paris (1960-1967 and 1969-1973) at the latest, where he sought to dissolve the surface of his works and opened

his practice to three-dimensionality and assemblage. The political situation in Caniaris’ home country (to which he returned in 1967 to participate in the

popular resistance movement against the Greek military junta until he was forced to leave again in 1969) and his experiences in Berlin (1973-1975)

heightened his interest in the aesthetics of sculpture and contributed to the growing socio-political dimension of his works.

Caniaris’ visual language is distinctive and surprising for its period, leading to

invitations to show his work at the Venice Biennale (1964 and 1988) and Documenta 6 (1977), along with numerous solo exhibitions (incl. shows at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1970), Moderna Museet, Stockholm

(1972) and the ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1976)). His unique idiom of forms and materials, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, has

influenced artists up to the present day. Caniaris’ objects and installations demonstrate a treatment of material that has become established practice in

contemporary works by artists such as Isa Genzken, Cathy Wilkes, or Kai Althoff.

Underscoring his role as a source of inspiration for a younger generation of cultural producers, his exhibition at the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst

will trace the development of Caniaris’ oeuvre across his career. An extensive side programme will accompany the exhibition, providing opportunities to

explore his work and its relevance to the production of contemporary art from a range of perspectives.

A catalogue will be published.

The exhibition is sponsored by:

The GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst is funded by:

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THE BREEDER

Iasonos 45, 10436, Athens, t/f +30 210 33 17 527 [email protected] www.thebreedersystem.com

A Fax from Pierre Restany to Vlassis Caniaris Paris, 23 April 1999 My Dear Vlassis When you finally reached me on the phone to tell me about your retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Athens and that the grand opening would be on the 22nd of this coming June, the news activated a whole series of associated memories. To begin with, since June 22 is my birthday and thus is for me at least the most immediate mark of the passing of time. I look back 40 years. The collective awareness, engendered by the New Realists, of modern industrial, urban, and tempered nature, were all at the starting point of a broader movement of the appropriative recylying [sic] of the real. Galerie J was the “headquarters”, as it were, for these New adventures in the object (Paris 1961) and you were one of the protagonists. Your sculptural assemblages, made out of household objects, fabrics and worn-out clothes, were in direct reference to the social prism of our post-war era, seen through the visual angle of a Mediterranean culture. Thus I felt in you the prolegomena to a new Greek sculpture – I felt or rather had a presentiment of the first poetics of a sociological approach to the world, the subsequent flowering of which was to focus you directly on the heartbreak of your era and the history of your country: the artists in exile in Paris, the mass migration of workers to Germany, the slow course toward democracy and the sudden fall of the Colonel’s dictatorship. The organic humor that is part and parcel of your genius with things, permitted you to use all of these subjects, even the most completely greek ones, like the antagonism with Turkey or the folkloric burden of Orthodox fantaticism, which you then made paradigmatic. Approaching he problems in depth, you learned to stress the relationships and analogies with other conditions that other people has experienced elsewhere. You compressed these conditions into their smallest common denominator which at the same time is the greatest one for humanity. Connecting humanity with the innovativeness of your artistic language, you lived to full intensity those glorious moments of planetary time and helped me to live them better with you. I thank you Vlassis, Pierre

Vlassis Caniaris: Composition (1974), Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2012

Vlassis Caniaris: 'Composition' (1974) Institute exhibition 30th May 2012 - 2nd September 2012 Gallery 4

Vlassis Caniaris 'Composition' (1974) Mixed media 140 x 50 x 50cm Panos and Sandra Marinopoulos Collection, Athens Courtesy The Breeder, Athens

Vlassis Caniaris (1928-2011) left his native Greece in 1956 for Rome, subsequently spending time in Paris and Berlin, to then return to Athens in 1976. This was a period of large-scale migration of workers from the south to the north of Europe, the peripatetic labour force created by economic circumstances. Drawn from the surrounding world, rather than seeking to represent it, Caniaris' observational artworks operate within a frame of social subjectivity.

From the late 1950s he made use of materials ready at hand, deploying colour and surface to make human-scale sculptures from makeshift and abandoned objects. From the mid 1960s he began to create resourceful, caustic compositions made from objects and materials bearing the traces of use, such as wire netting, plaster, clothes, battered toys, rags, artificial flowers, pallets, cardboard boxes, newspaper clippings and suitcases.

This display presents a single work from 1974, 'Composition'. A pair of yellow legs stands on a white stool, both feet wearing buckled grey shoes, one resting on top of a section of MDF. The legs are a pair of tights, shaped by an armature of wire netting to stand tall, albeit rather

misshapen, with the right thigh wrapped by a white rag and the waist filled out by red plastic carnations. The part-figure throws a shadow behind itself that masquerades as a more traditional form - perhaps a classical Greek sculpture, arms and head lost over time, or the fragmented body of Auguste Rodin's headless and armless 'Striding Man'. Here in the Institute's 2012-2013 exhibition programme his standing figure enters into a dialogue with sculptures by Michael Dean, Sarah Lucas and Sturtevant.

Further information • Showing alongside: • Michael Dean: Government • Phyllida Barlow: Bad Copies © The Henry Moore Foundation 2012 • Henry Moore Perry Green • Henry Moore Institute • Contact us • Terms of use of the website • Sitemap !

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Vlassis!Caniaris,!World!of!Interiors!(Main),!September!2012!!!

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Vlassis Caniaris, “Vlassis Caniaris”, ARTFORUM critics’ picks, artforum.com, October 2011

Vlassis Caniaris, “Goings on About: Art, Vlassis Caniaris”, The New Yorker, October 2011, www.newyorker.com/

Vlassis Caniaris, “Vlassis Caniaris, 1928 – 2011”, March 4, 2011, Art Review, http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blogs/vlassis-caniaris-1928-2011

Vlassis Caniaris, the Greek artist, best known for making work within the arte povera style, has died, his Athens gallery The Breeder have announced. Caniaris, who was 83, had a retrospective at the National Gallery Athens in 1999, and previously exhibitied at ARC Paris, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Muesum am Ostwall Dortmund, the ICA London, the Venice Biennale in 1964, and Documenta 6. Until 1996 he was the chair of architecture at the National Technical University in Greece. On Thursday at The Armory fair in New York, The Breeder were carrying a collage work from the mind-1960s, and Caniaris's Berlin gallery Giti Nourbakhsch exhibited two early scuptures by the artist. Caniaris is also represented by Team, New York

!Vlassis!Caniaris,!A!Free.for.All!Spirit!Breezes!Into!a!Vast!Art!Fair,!Roberta!Smith,!

New!York!Times,!March!4!2011,!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/arts/design/04armory.html!

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Vlassis Caniaris, “Sarah Lucas, Ordinary Things”, published by The Henry Moore Foundation, extract from Lisa De Faeuvre’s text, “Ordinary Things”.

Vlassis Caniaris, “A defiant artist”, Manos Stefanidis, Athens Insider, !"#$%&'( 2011, )*+,'( 93

Vlassis Caniaris, 1928-2011 // Creating Art with History, Yatzer, 22 March 2011 http://www.yatzer.com/Vlassis-Caniaris-1928-2011-Creating-Art-with-History !

!Vlassis Caniaris, Tourist, 1974, mixed media, dimensions variable Courtesy of The Breeder,

Athens

>>> Guest contribution by Manos Stefanidis - Assistant Professor, University

of Athens - for Yatzer.com

In art I’m equally interested for the aesthetic creations as much as for the

attitude towards life of the creator. Vlassis Caniaris was a modern artist,

politicized but never militized, who acted undisturbed for the past sixty years,

from late modernism to the roots of postmodernism encompassing his

exclusive morphoplastic material, the body of history and more specifically of

modern Greek history, from the civil war of 1944-1949 till the dictatorship of

1967 - 1974 and the restitution of democracy to this day. His work was

monoid but polyommatus, like that of mythical Argus, reconnoitering the

sociopolitical scene inside and outside and taking a position on occurrence.

Acting subsequently as great Art acted: comforting, but also revealing;

poignant, but also construing. The distinctiveness of his aesthetic overture is

in the details; overcome that, transforms a random object in morphological

value that transfuses the paltry bits of precious, murmuring any personal

history, any laugh or sob in the ears of eternity.

From his first informelles configurations in 1956-1957 on newspapers or

drippings on canvas, Caniaris did not describe, he put forward and proposed.

At the age of 30, in 1958 he presented his first solo exhibition in Athens

(Gallery "Zygos"), which is historically the first solo exhibition of abstract art

ever exhibited in Greece. All his works were dedicated to the departed of an

appalling accident that had taken place in the mines of Marcinelle – Belgium.

The contradiction is that this exhibition was ‘hit’ by pure Marxist criticism as

subjective and highly formalistic and praised by the "bourgeois" critics.of

modern Greek history, from the civil war of 1944-1949 till the dictatorship of

1967 - 1974 and the restitution of democracy to this day. His work was

monoid but polyommatus, like that of mythical Argus, reconnoitering the

sociopolitical scene inside and outside and taking a position on occurrence.

Acting subsequently as great Art acted: comforting, but also revealing;

poignant, but also construing. The distinctiveness of his aesthetic overture is

in the details; overcome that, transforms a random object in morphological

value that transfuses the paltry bits of precious, murmuring any personal

history, any laugh or sob in the ears of eternity.

From his first informelles configurations in 1956-1957 on newspapers or

drippings on canvas, Caniaris did not describe, he put forward and proposed.

At the age of 30, in 1958 he presented his first solo exhibition in Athens

(Gallery "Zygos"), which is historically the first solo exhibition of abstract art

ever exhibited in Greece. All his works were dedicated to the departed of an

appalling accident that had taken place in the mines of Marcinelle – Belgium.

The contradiction is that this exhibition was ‘hit’ by pure Marxist criticism as

subjective and highly formalistic and praised by the "bourgeois" critics.

Vlassis Caniaris, During ''Antidoro'' exhibition, November 2009. Courtesy of The Breeder,

Athens

In 1959 in Naples and Bologna, and in 1960 a solo exhibition at gallery “La

Tartaruga” of Rome, provides Caniaris the opportunity to convert the canvas

to space and the image to the object. He takes works from the exhibition

'Walls' and dedicates them to ‘the Resistance Movement of Athens and the

Civil War,’ in the untitled compositions, where the same material now

apologizes for its nature and its content. The scholar of the artist, Michael

Fehr, notes: "In the sixties (Caniaris) served in a very personal way the

dissolution of the classical concept of the painting and developed his own

particular language as a creator of objects.” Personally, I would add a lyrical

user of those objects.

!Vlassis Caniaris, Untitled, 1963, mixed media, 150x70x28 cm,

Courtesy of The Breeder, Athens

In a 1961 art construction, entitled ‘space in space’ Caniaris defines blue and

white vertical lines on a textured plaster surface in reference to the Greek

flag, and then affixes a black box as to erase the effort. The corresponding

‘Flags’ of Jasper Johns are noteworthy since 1955. Only that in this case, the

ideological – conflicting element and the emotional pressure is more intense.

Caniaris here politicizes even further the famous quote of Seferis ‘Wherever I

go, Greece wounds me.’ And all this firmly within the broader research

conducted by the European avant-garde from London to Rome and Paris to

Berlin trying to articulate his own argument against the advancement of

American Modernism: Nouveau Réalisme, L 'Art Autre, Arte Povera, Art and

Language are opposing proposals towards versions of Pop and Conceptual

Art's coming from the other side of the Atlantic.

1964 is a landmark year: Caniaris navigates to Venice Biennale like a

battleship, representing the U.S., Robert Rauschenberg - firmly supported by

a host of art critics. The first prize of the Biennale was the rational

consequence. As a diversionary measure the independent critic and

organizer of exhibitions Pierre Restany presents in the historic La Fenice

Theater in Venice in July of that year, anti-exhibition "Proposals for New

Greek Sculpting" participants were Daniel, Caniaris and Kessanlis.

Cardboard boxes, sheets, ladders, or clothes in wire frames are the "works";

the result was theatrical and scenographical at the same time, as much as

humorous and subversive, and has since been classified as disproportionately

significant.

Gradually, the artist sets up a human form, anticipating G. Heimonas when he

writes in "Enemy of the Poet" that the human form does not exist in nature but

is invented in painting.

His next big stop is the exhibition of 1969 in the “New Gallery” in Athens, while

dictatorship is raging in Greece and is transferred to the Musée d'Art Moderne

de la Ville de Paris in 1970. His works of 1964 seem almost prophetic; they

engage gypsum with military belts, barbed wire with carnations and traces of

feet with toy soldiers.

!Vlassis Caniaris, Interrogation, 1969, plaster, wire, fabric, plastic, 110x60x50cm. Courtesy of

The Breeder, Athens

!!Vlassis Caniaris, Youngster, 1974, mixed media, 170x 55x70cm. Courtesy of The Breeder,

Athens

Caniaris makes a striking political statement - he is already a member of the resistance organization "Democratic Defense," while he constitutes the most sophisticated artistic works in the Greek art scene. His generation, the generation of the 1960’s, whose internationalism is very different to the previous Hellenism of the 1930’s, has brilliant representatives like Chryssa, Takis, G. Kounellis, K. Xenakis, Paul L. Samaras, St. Antonakos, and P. Xagoraris. Among them, lonely and detached is Caniaris. An artist who had simultaneously Tsarouchis and Moralis as professors and Duchamp, Pollock or the Brotheraers and the fellow Tapies, Beuys, Spoerri, Rotella, Merz, Vostell, Arman, Richter, Hacker and many more. It is noteworthy to emphasize the specificity of a true artist who comes from the suburbs but is active and dynamic in cultural art centers such as Rome, Paris or Berlin, using 'native’ materials the “bad question” that the ancient Athenians charged the tragic poet Phrynichus. Furthermore, subsequent to World War II we lived numerous instances of a ‘concerted' leadership, which remained in sensationalism or the surface had little to do with activism of Boccioni, or a juvenile poetic Breton. In our country, and elsewhere, often the sophistication of a form was praised as a revolution, but was merely formalism. We also know how agonizing the market is when looking for a "new product” and how such a reality creates a kind of production history, which acts parallel to the official.!!

!!Vlassis Caniaris, Boudoir, 1974, mixed media, 320 x 550 x 300 cm. Courtesy of The Breeder,

Athens

The real leader comes forward always in direct correspondence with the

society that carries it. And this is the key area of achievement of Vlassis

Caniaris, an artist who apposite’s the original codes of leadership to extend

expressively while working primarily. He herein positions the undisputed bid,

using transnational know-how to interpret indigenous experience, at that time-

and locally-his identity. That is how his work is the interactive combination of

international and national long before any ethnic guide. And it is this exact

component that appends to the exploration of the nature of drama, but also

led to the necessary clearance.

!!Vlassis Caniaris, Untitled, 2010, mixed media, 70x40x40 cm Courtesy of The Breeder, Athens

Caniaris, in a timely manner shaped his personal idiom as he explored the

current morphological characters so that to speak directly and original about

his personal experience. From tachisme and the lyrical abstract of Marcinelle

(1956-1959) to the "Walls" (1959), the repoussé, namely dramatized surfaces

visually recorded the time of his generation. A sequence of tragic events, the

story itself is what triggers the formation, but devoid of this formation being

diverted to a figurative naiveness. Since then the subject of Pop or the cast of

Arte Povera is developed - parallel to what happens to the rest of Europe or

the U.S. at that time - strategy tools to visualize an entirely personal-

experiential mythology. For this artist, Greece of hydrocephalus development

and structural contradictions, of the pathetic dictatorship and the junta, the

restoration of democracy, but also the rogue immigrants, from where the third

world South is promoted to the advanced Northern Europe, transformed into

evocative performances by theatrical mannequins of unique design

intelligence, as it happened at the exhibition “Gastarbeiter -Fremdarbeiter ,”

Berlin, 1974, “Hélas Hellas – The Painter and his Model” Multi-cultural space

‘Fix-Bernier’ 1980, in " Where is North and Where is South?” at the 1988

Venice Biennale, and in the group exhibition "About Homeland” in the House

of Cyprus in 1996.

Caniaris was armed with modern history, functioning in a critical and intrusive

manner regarding the average taste undermining the current complacency.

This is the case of an artist who has experienced groundbreaking expression

and succès de scandale, but also a need to overcome, which resulted in a

proposal for the body, which is not a single political or social subject, but an

ontological, existential figure. The figure of loneliness or margin expressed

through aesthetic media I believe that the “Walls” of Caniaris are the

precursors of graffiti and street-art. The mannequins in an ingenious manner

join the artist’s articulated model of De Chirico and the figures of Seagal

forming an existential proposal, "dilapidated" sculptures across large scale

monuments of empty rhetoric and the extravaganza of propaganda. The

"Urinal of History" 1979-1980 is addressed in political terms to the "Fountain"

of Duchamp (1917) and is a leading postwar work of the Greek avant-garde.

When Caniaris was speaking at a given moment in time, unsuspicious about

the pan-European problem of immigration and the dimension of this problem

(1970) for the unequal relations between Greece and Germany (1973), the

class-toxic contrasting North-South (1988) was in numerous cases prophetic.

However, above all Caniaris reports since 1980 the oversized populism

(Hélas-Hellas Greece, alas) by paying to it the root of the upcoming crisis. As

per this, he was one of the few in the whole of Greek intellectuals.

!!Vlassis Caniaris, Urinals of History, 1980, installation view at Helas Hellas (The painter and his model), Technohoros Bernier, Fix Brewery, Athens!!!!

!!Vlassis Caniaris, Urinals of History, 1980, installation view at Helas Hellas (The painter and

his model), Technohoros Bernier, Fix Brewery, Athens

Vlassis Caniaris, Observer, 2005, mixed media, 190x70x70 cm

Courtesy of The Breeder, Athens

!

!"#$%& '()*#+%&, “Vlassis Caniaris, Sculptures from 1973-74”, MacDirectory, 25-08-2011, http://www.macdirectory.com/component/option,com_events/task,viewDetail/event_id,33028/

Vlassis Caniaris, “3rd Athens Biennale” by Despina Zefkili, frieze magazine, issue 145, March 2012

!Major!modern!Greek!art!exhibition!opens!in!London,!The!Independent,!!June!2011!!

!

!!!

!"#$%& '()*#+%&, “Vlassis Caniaris, Sculptures from 1973-74”, NYAB Event, September 2011

VLASSIS CANIARIS

The New York Times Style Magazine Artifacts | Art Frazzle CULTURE | By LINDA YABLONSKY | JUNE 22, 2010, 5:00 PM http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/artifacts-art-frazzle/#more-90159

Thomas Baylre’s work featured at Galerie Mezzanin (Vienna).

VLAWhen the 41st Art Basel closed last Sunday, 62,500 people had passed through its

doors in a week. That was a record number. They were artists, private collectors,

consultants, artists, museum trustees and curators, historians and critics, and they

looked at art in 300 galleries from 36 countries. These are the only solid statistics. No

one tracks how much money changes hands at these assemblies of art and fraternity,

but a conservative guess would be a few hundred million dollars. Considering how

many people plunk down $35,000 for a couture handbag, taking home a more unique

$2 million Paul McCarthy or a $15 million Picasso doesn’t seem like such a stretch in

Basel.

If a person wants to buy a trophy, this is the place to come. But price doesn’t determine

quality any more than pretty means good, and personal taste doesn’t weave the fabric

of culture. Shared experience and collective energy does. And that is the heart of Art

Basel.

Looking back on it now, the pleasure for me was almost all in single-artist or tightly

focused presentations that made it possible, well, to focus a conversation. It’s risky for

dealers to pin their reputations on one artist rather than represent their whole business,

but Berlin’s Neugerriemschneider did it with the British guitar legend Billy Childish’s van

Gogh-on-acid paintings, and New York’s Greene Naftali bet the farm on the better-look-

twice deconstructions of Gedi Sibony. And neither seemed to suffer a lack of sales.

People go to Basel to buy, not to browse.

When they want a break from consumer culture, they head out for the museums, but I

found what I was looking for — something I hadn’t seen before — at Art Feature. This

was a new addition to the main fair, where 20 small galleries relegated to the outer rim,

10 on each floor (or circle of hell, as some had it), mounted mini-exhibitions of new or

newly discovered works from the 1970s. Here prices mattered less than exposure on an

international stage; it was an investment of time that brought the greater reward.

The Breeder from Athens had a rather poignant arrangement of domestic objects that I

first mistook as the work of some young thing who assembled found materials into a

navel-gazing whole. In fact, the artist was Vlassis Caniaris, a Greek born in 1928, who

had made the work in the ’70s, and could show today’s art students more than a thing

or two about a world greater than themselves.

Another traffic stopper was at the New Yorker Alexander Gray’s display of vintage ’70s

and new work by the very undersung Jack Whitten, an African-American who started

painting with a squeegee about 20 years before Gerhard Richter ever tried it. At

London’s Vilma Gold, I found an enthralling, multichannel video installation, “Joints 4tet

Ensemble,” by Charles Atlas, based on Super-8 films that he made with the late Merce

Cunningham from 1971 through 1978. Atlas filmed the movement of the dancer’s

expressive hands, knees, elbows and feet in tight close-up and set the 10 “joints” on

pedestals of various heights. Set to an ambient score by John Cage, it was one of the

most fascinating works I saw in Basel.

The rest of Art Feature was just as revelatory: neglected, wrinkled-paper works by the

proto-conceptualist Franz Erhard Walther at Jocelyn Wolff (Paris); deceptively simple

painted wood sculptures by Michael Buthe at Galerie Thomas Flor (Dusseldorf); early

religious-themed drawings by the earth artist James Cohan (New York) and a jet engine

that former weaver Thomas Bayrle tricked up to mimic the rhythm of a loom

accompanied by the sound of women clicking their rosaries at Galerie Mezzanin

(Vienna). This was Art Basel at its best. I love the spontaneous conversations in the aisles and the late nights at the Kunsthalle bar, but I also love to travel. Here was a trip around the world and through time in the space of a hundred yards. No baggage to check, no security. Just a cushion for the life of the mind.

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Vlassis Caniaris: An Iconoclastic Testimony

In: Anna Kafetsi, ed. Vlassis Caniaris: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Athens: National Gallery and Alexandros

Soutzos Museum, 1999.), pp. 33 – 41.

“entre Brecht et Beckett…”

Pierre Restany

“Sur Canaris: Notes d’Aspen”, 1971.

Preconditions for a Critical Reading The artistic creation and contribution of Vlassis Caniaris should be viewed in the context of the so-called Generation of the Diaspora which since the Fifties has been active, either permanently or for long periods, in European artistic centers, such as Rome, Paris, and, later, Berlin. It has become a common place of current critical reception, at least during the last two decades, to intimate that the artists of this generation brought about the fundamental watershed in modern Greek art of the 20

th century, and in any case inaugurated an authentic form of modernism, in

clear contradistinction to the Thirties Generation to which at any rate is attributed the split with academic tradition which had already been dealt a powerful blow by the more advanced works of K. Maleas and S. Papaloukas, not to slight K. Parthenis. If this viewpoint is valid – and it is valid to a certain point – then first and foremost it means that in our consideration of modern Greek art we accept two degrees of modernism, which calls for an examination of the special terms under which the dualism in question was formed, or became accepted. The question that arises, right from the beginning, is what precise differentiation marks post-war modernism. In agreement with the spirit informing the relevant critical writings, it is thought that the Generation of the Diaspora, largely because of its direct contact and interconnections with the artistic currents, reduced or negated the chronological distance which for decades had separated Greek art from the European avant-garde, sharing in the creation of contemporary artistic reality. Nevertheless, in order to confirm the forward looking character of its artistic production, which [was] far from homogeneous, it must be examined from a methodological point of view right from the start in relationship to a) the preceding generations and their differentiated characteristics, b) the artists of the same generation who consciously chose to remain in Greece and seek artistic solutions from “the inside”, and c) the European and international context (social and artistic) which they wanted to become a part of. An initial comparative attempt leads us to the conclusion that in contrast to the so-called Thirties Generation, the thematic elements of which turned criticism to a superficial, hellenocentric and because of that, ideologised and unhistoric reading of the works, the artists of the post-war diaspora showed no interest right from the outset in the problems of national identity and indigenous artistic traditions. This discovery permits us to indeed recognize a fundamental change in the orientation of artistic production. Nonetheless, the essential difference – and looked at another way, the similarity – between these two artistic generations must be sought beyond the thematic, ideological, or even morphological level. In terms of the Thirties Generation, recent critical inquiry has clearly revealed to us that its real relationship with modernism has been re-established and reaffirmed to the degree that the Greek references truly serve as specific artistic plan which aspires to the autonomy of the visual language. It remains to be examined from what theoretical and epistemological examples the artists of the diaspora drew their innovations and finally which conception of art was promoted by their concrete directions, choices and realizations. Within this context possibly, and after the customary morphological and ideological hobbyhorses have been abandoned, there can be an analysis or, even a transcendence of the sometimes expressed and other times unconfessed distance between those inside and those outside, or put another way, between the “outlanders” and the “inlanders”, to employ the terminology applied to the more general straight of institutional positions during the 19

th century in

Greece. Only in this way can the imperative critical - and not final by any means – look at the

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more recent history of Greece be able to avoid the mystilications, in one direction or another, and move forward on secure bases to the evaluation of the contribution of the artists of the diaspora and those who remained in Greece on both an individual and collective level. This, of course, presupposes, collection and an interpretative approach to the primary artistic material and the successive critical readings of it through the mechanism of specialized monographs and the organization of retrospective exhibitions of the most important artists, something which has only recently been instituted and which must be continued. The retrospective exhibition of Vlassis Caniaris can be viewed from such a perspective and is exploratory in character. With the full awareness that an exhibition is not a book, and with the limitations imposed by objective factors, such as the exhibition space at our disposal, we chose 166 works, the largest part of which are contained in the very inclusive – practically complete – body of the catalogue raisonné compiled by Michael Fehr (Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg 1991) dealing with the artist’s production between 1948 and 1983. Through this specific choice we had set ourselves a dual aim: a)to follow the development of Caniaris’ work down through time, from 1955 to the Nineties, with the exception of certain early paintings and training exercises – starting in 1948 – in which a conscious painterly point of view cannot as yet be discerned, b) to track down the inner shifts in his artistic creativity through eight concrete unities, quite a number of which have been chronologically determined by the artist himself in a practically unshakeable conviction. Through the organization of the material and our subjective interpretative reading we are endeavoring to reveal the composition of the particular pictorial plan of Vlassis Caniaris set against the horizon of his sources, references and relationships to his artistic surroundings. The more specific investigation of these relationships with contemporary artistic currents have been entrusted to experts on his work and/or the art of the post-war period, the texts of whom can be found in the present volume. Moreover, in the anthology of critical texts we have appended, a framework for the historical reception of his works by Greek and European criticism has been suggested. Beyond the analysis, of a literary or anecdotal character, what is of primary interest to us are the tracking down of the epistemological starting points and the coordinates of his artistic system, under the light of which the radicalness and inner coherence of his work can best be appraised. Referentiality and Self-referentiality When in 1956 Vlassis Caniaris left Greece to settle in Rome he carried with him in his luggage, in addition to his diploma from the Athens School of Fine Arts, his experience gained from his contact with two of the leading representatives of the Thirties Generation, Professor Yannis Moralis and, outside the school, Yannis Tsarouchis. Specific artistic influences from either one or the other are not to be found, except in the early training exercises from that period. But there is no question that the artist’s early interest in the urban landscape and the mythology of the everyday is related to his informal study with Tsarouchis, their cooperative endeavors in stage design and scene painting and the drawing and photographic recording of neoclassical buildings of Athens that were being pulled down. Examples of this interest can be found both in the relevant photographic archives formed between 1953 – 1955 and the first studies of Athens, some of which open the retrospective cycle of the present exhibition. Nevertheless, even though the artist started out sharing a point of view in common with the Thirties generation, there had already begun to appear a shift from genre and mystified indicators to the formulation of a sociopolitical climate. Moreover [t]he entire visual treatment found in these early works (cat. Nos. 1- 3), despite their apparent reduction to the level of the canvas, retain its verisimilitude, concerned that the referentiality itself and the descriptive aspects of the subject not be transcended on the artistic level. There is already an early basic element being stressed which together with the theatricality and the presence of spectators-witnesses in the composition will constitute the nucleus of Canarias’ later aesthetic realism and the starting point for the formation of his artistic plan. The studies of Athens, if nothing else, demonstrate this desire of the young

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artist, even if unconscious, to confront the referential function of visual language, prefixing the iconographic content, predetermined by a specific social character. With the possibilities afforded by a retrospective glance, one recognizes that from early on the depiction of the real by an expanded concept, and without surrendering to the temptations of socialist realism, is shown to be the visual problem par excellence. The solution to this would not be achieved before the artist made, at the beginning of the Sixties, his own new representative conventions corresponding to those of his era, which nonetheless presupposed the end of the picture as such. Until then and under the pressure of a need to relinquish imitative and conventional visual codes in order to reach the goal aspired to, he is led, as his immediately following steps make evident, to the questioning or the complete rejection of the referentiality of painting. This rejection would unavoidably pass through an abstract painting stage, which in he international centers had already run its creative course, as well as the manipulation of the painting material, the exodus of canvas into space and its objectification. The emancipation from the referent appeared as a necessary stage before a reconnection with the real world could be made under other terms. Thus in a four year period the young artist covered the gamut of speculations of international contemporary art of the Fifties. In the thematic unities entitled Abstract Works (1957 – 58), Walls, (1959) and Space Within Space (1960) we can follow the successive transformations from the direct reference to the external world to a self-referential painting in which, nevertheless, the real is reintroduced in a cryptic manner. The passage to the zero point of figurativeness was prepared by a series of half-abstract works from 1956 where the referents taken from the world of the sea have undergone geometric schematization, and are made hard to read. In the primarily abstract production of the following two year period, note must be made of the maturity and – sometimes – the calligraphic elegance which are to be found in many works from the series disaster IN Marcinelle (1957) AND Garden of my Childhood (1958). After abandoning the last remnants of his descriptive elements for their visual equivalents of equal strength, and the hybrid forms for their gestural energy, Caniaris gradually advanced on to the complete autonomization of the painting by means of colour and graphisms. Many of these works would be presented in the historic solo exhibition held at Zygos Gallery in 1958, provoking reactions which would provide the spark for an aesthetic discussion concerning the abstract idiom still newfangled for the Athenian public. Having in a short period of time made the codes of the non-objective painting his own, the artist then organized a self-signifying space, dramatic but often lyrical as well, where the subject of reference has been reduced by means of a variety of formal correlations to a pictorial idea. Moreover, he put an emphasis on the texture of the painting surface and recorded on the uniform, practically monochromatic, space the traces of unconventional means (pieces of cloth, sponges) which for the most part, replaced the brushes, or exploited the heterogeneity of the scripts employed. Furthermore, the impetuous gesturality was held in check by a labyrinthine design space, open toward a multifocused background. The reference to modern artists, above all Jackson Pollock, and to movements in Europe and America (biomorphic abstract expressionism, “art informel”) which he had the opportunity to come into contact with in the Italian capital, are obvious. His periodic involvement with automatism, bequeathed to younger artists by mature surrealism, in his drawings on newspapers from 1957 and 1958 and above all the monotypes done on blotting paper permitted the painter to develop, if still hesitantly, he fortuitous as a bearing surface and as an element of the artistic process. The arbitrary splitting up of the monotypes and the subsequent autonomization of the pieces which were multiplied in a fortuitous manner, must be viewed as an endeavor to distance the painting from the concern with composition and at the same time as approach to the ready-made image. The insistence on the logic of the internal significations of the abstract formalist painting and the gesture as an expressive value in itself, no longer made any sense to the artist, from the moment he achieved the next important step: the liberation of the creative process from the limitations of the conventional figurative composition. Having already by the end of 1958 attempted, still timidly, to use paper in the rendering of abstract figures in relief, in the Walls series which was launched at the beginning of the following year, Caniaris saw in the abandonment of color and its

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replacement with inferior nonaesthetic materials, a new level of emancipation of the painting from its illusionist and its traditional representative function. Plaster came to be his favorite of the real materials (pieces of cloth, paper, string) that he established on the frame. Its density and colorlessness permit the artist to liberate the painting space within the limits of the frame from the hierarchy of formal elements or the internal relationships between them lending it a holistic character and the appearance of an object. Although in any case the colorlessness – and monochromicity in general – refashion the painting – object it into an absolute and continuous space, a common pursuit in various visual practices in the Fifties, in Walls, Caniaris does not transcend the aesthetic osmosis between the material and the gestural action. This is the element which differentiates him from Mantzoni’s Colorless series, from 1958, for example, which not unjustifiably comes to mind. If for the Italian artist colorlessness insures [sic] painting the same unaesthetic state laid claim to by the ready-made of Duchamp, in our case it does not shed its expressive value. The plastered painting surface is confronted primarily as a malleable material body which is subject to wear and tear and to all kinds of interventions on the artist’s part: collage, scraping, empty spaces, effacement. This visual body thus elaborated bears the intense traces of the gestural act, to which it owes its creation. Nevertheless, in quite a number of works from this series the frequent presence of, as a rule, easily read, legal palimpsests, despite the successive coverings or erasures, could be considered as the bringing back of the real in the guise of a direct verbal reference to the recent post civil war climate in Greece of the time. This is also contributed to by the reduced but still intense use of red and blue, which could be taken as symbolic of the warring parties, under the condition that we are not led into making any further quasi-literary and historical interpretations. But as the dominant characteristic remains the artist’s intent to make paintings with non-conventional materials which are so transformed that the total impression made by the paintings of this series sweeten vision without a trace of the insipid. The liberation of the painting from its traditional status would propel the artist along other roads as we can observe in the works entitled Space Within Space from 1960, by which time he had already settled in Paris. In this series, first and foremost, the closed, contoured space of the frame as the artist’s field of intervention is transcended and the exodus of the painting into the free architectural space is inaugurated. One of the ways by which this is achieved, is the replacement of the bearing surface to the rear, enclosed up till then, with net-like wire mesh, or even its complete abolition. Its opening toward the wall, fully or partially, sets up a new dialectic between the painting surface, the frame and the architectural bearing surface. Through this new reality are replaced the traditional relationships of figure and background and the architectural parameter is incorporated into the conception of the painting itself. The traditional internal space of paintings thus cedes its position to real space. The question that arises is how the artist developed this new potential which by the end of the Forties, had already opened to a multiplicity of exploitation Fontana’s practice of perforated and ripped paintings. Since we have excluded a phenomenological approach to the perception of space which was a problem that would particularly occupy a certain group of American pre-conceptual artists at the beginning of the Sixties, and without ignoring the intention of escaping from the stifling limitations of the picture frame in favour of an expanded spatiality, we could maintain that the incorporation of the transparent surface within the perimeter of the picture itself attracted the interest of Caniaris, and for one basic reason above all else” it allowed him to question – and even to invalidate the traditional representative function of painting. From this point of view, we would say that we are led to the epitome of self-referentiality of the painting, through which it assumes the character of an object within space. None of the works in this series represents, in such a vivid manner, this type of promotion of the painting toward objectification by means of the transparency of the framework, better than the dramatic Back and Forth (cat. No. 52) from 1962, which also constitutes a limit before objects became all dominant. On the one hand, it delineates the end of painting on a frame with conventional means since for the first time there is an attempt to replace the depiction of the real with the real thing itself, such as a ready-made object (the trousers, for example). On the other, in the way it is established in space – it is

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not hung on the wall - it projects the mutual dependence of the framework-object and the architectural content. In the transition from the two-dimensional surface to the object, the artist ended up with both transparency and its antithesis, compactness and density of the painted covering, which had already appeared in Walls from 1959. Plaster transformed the covered surface into a homogeneous whole and in combination with the use of other methods, such as the replacement of the stretched canvas on the frame with the loose wire or fabric support, and the standardisation of the artistic intervention, the objective character of the painting is stressed. The same aim is served by other modifications of the bearing surface, particularly the abandonment of the usual rectangular regular shape of the framework for the various combinations of shapes. Even though with the transparency the communication with the energy of the nonvisible part of the painting is assured, all of the various extensions effected by metal rods beyond the traditional frame create a new dialogue with the wall. The conditions for the transition from painting to sculpture had already come of age. The aesthetic concern which has never ceased to occupy the artist, even in his more concerted attempts at demystification, will continue to seek new outlets. Toward a Semiotic Definition of Objects Beginning in 1961 the object, initially on the wall and the following year three-dimensional, was definitely established in the work of Vlassis Caniaris. The crucial transcendence of painting by this Greek artist, the theoretical starting-points which we noted above, can be more broadly understood in the context of a ten year period during which he became acquainted, on the one hand, with the idolization of the object by the new realists and pop art and on the other with its “conceptualization”, to the point of its complete dematerialization with all the artistic practices that were opposed to the production of aesthetic objects for viewing. Unrelated to epistemological parameters which dictate one or the other tendency, their limits and quests relative to a new condition of existence in art, which, moreover, affects the degree of radicalness of these tendencies, as opposed to whatever came before, we today accept as their common starting point their reference to Marcel Duchamp and the aesthetics of the ready-made. The relevant readings vary from the neo-dadaist approach (Johns – Rauschenberg, new realists) to analytical-conceptual quests (Mantzoni – Broodthaers, American conceptualists). Nevertheless, the common denominator must be viewed as the adoption, during the Fifties in America and Europe, of the statement of aesthetics which was inaugurated by Duchamp at the beginning of the century with Bicycle Wheel (1913). More specifically, the interests of artists very different from one another, who were motivated by a common dismissive attitude toward the formalist logic of the self-signifying work which was contemporary with them, focused themselves, on the one hand, on the abandonment of painting in favor of the ready-made object and on the other the replacement of the traditional methods used for producing a work of art by means of artistic proposal, as this is declared through the artist’s choice and the presentation of a non-aesthetic object as a work of art. Each and every time we are obliged to examine the way in which the artist makes use of things within his own system, and in the final analysis is positioned face to face with the definition and function of the ready-made, as this is formulated in the analytical proposal, ‘this is a work of art’. Caniaris unavoidably encountered this definition from the moment he rejected the validity of the workshop and before he had yet abandoned the frame itself. Nevertheless, the rejection of the traditional morphoplastic process and the technical or transcendent skills of the creator, does not render him completely indifferent to the aesthetic appearance of the work of art, as has been claimed, nor on the other hand, does strict materiality lay claim to elements of conceptuality on the level of the viewer’s engagement. The theoretical consequences of aesthetics thus conceived, by declaration, to the degree that can be detected in his work, refer mainly to the invalidation of traditional criteria of aesthetic evaluation and the search for them on another level. Furthermore, they touch on the role of the creator, but also on the conditions under which the art is received, ending with a reconsideration of the role of the viewer. Our judgments of the work are

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no longer dictated by taste or talent of the artist, but by the authority of the institutional discourse. As has occurred in the post-Duchamp era, the artistic essence of an anti-aesthetic object is guaranteed, in addition to the artist’s will, by the institutional spaces of presentation and consumption, such as a museum, a gallery or an exhibition event, and in the end by the viewer’s eye which receives these objects as works of art. From this point of view the museographic valovisation [sic] of works of anti-art, can be considered to be inscribed as a necessary condition within their inner structure. Vlassis Caniaris has remained faithful to a neo-dadaist approach, elevating the found object to a level of art, and from that to a reintroduction, along other paths, of the aesthetic dimension, as can be detected in the Fifties in the work of the new realists and the Americans Johns and Rauschenberg. Within this context, he appropriates purely ready-made objects or cheap and useless materials, which are transformed aesthetically, and are incorporated into a new artistic environment. And in both instances we have the production of new artistic objects which while retaining the recognizable elements supplied to them by everyday experience, at the same time constitute a part of an aesthetic event with its own semiotic function. From this point of view, there is little concern expressed as to whether they are arranged on flat surfaces through the cubist logic of collage or are left free in space, as autonomous “sculptures”, enclosed within themselves, in line with the modern prototype. More or less arbitrary arrangements and assemblages of ready-made objects and materials, following cubist-dadaist practices from the beginning of the century, are transformed into closed aesthetic wholes. Through the terms of the formalist game, in this case, these ready-made objects and the hybrids constructed with corresponding materials, are subjected to and function within a framework of structural relationships amongst themselves, which we are called upon to decodify semiotically. According to this meaning, one can maintain that in the work of Caniaris ad even more broadly in quite a number of neo-dadaists, the function of the ready-made does not transcend the structural and semiotic character of the modern work, where various elements of independent origins are arranged in a sum total of formal and semantic relationships. Thus, the ready-made object in the new artistic context is equivalent to the structural model analysis of language, where the meaning is produced by means of the relationships of the elements of the two or three-dimensional work. If the artistic function of the ready-made favors, in terms of the system being examined, a semiotic definition of the objects, it is necessary that we follow the shifts this system suggests, from the purely morphological level and the problematic of structural mechanism of form in the work of art, on the semantic level and in the content. Here is where his rupture with the formalist tradition occurs – but also with practices connected to early Dada, Schwitters for example – despite the localizing analogies concerning organization, function, the condition in space and the aesthetic/visuality of three-dimensional objects. In reality, Caniaris does not want to sacrifice, for the sake of the aesthetics of morphological and material conventions, which moreover he consciously abandoned a while before as an artistic activity at an impasse, his reconnection with referentiality. The neo-dadaist appropriation of the real object, and indeed one so heavily charged socially, as for example the rags and the used clothe, could not have been for him either an end in itself in the direction of a simple negative action, nor a much simpler means for a new style and poetics, as it was for certain of the new realists. On the contrary, he finds in the real object the most appropriate means for making the reconnection with his quest for that representation which temporarily had been set aside while he set about fashioning the suitable conditions. For this purpose, he exploits the semiotic process itself according to which the primary reality of the ready-made object is restructured into the secondary reality of a sign. The latter retains all the reference indicators and the referential power of the real materials, in order to subsequently lend a new meaning, by means of the morphopoetic or directive process, to space. Thus, although since the Sixties the artist has drawn materials and objects of reference, such as rags, worn-out clothes, tulle, string, sacks, remnants of consumer products from the same well-spring, in his work he makes them burst with new meaning each and [e]very time. Anthropomorphic, or in any case, readible [sic], the new three-dimensional idols of reality are constructed of wire, or, depending on the case, wooden frames dressed or plastered, while starting in the Seventies, and

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almost exclusive use of found objects is to be observed. In this case, the manual, constructional activity of the artist is limited to what suffices and is shifted from the making of the forms themselves to the setting of the scene. Nearer to Dadaist attitude and perception of reality, the first peculiar and enigmatic puppets made by Caniaris appeared to be theatrical figures but without alluding to any specific heroes or characters, functioning rather as metonymies and synecdoches of the human essence. One of the most astute observations that we owe to the French critic Pierre Restany and which we have borrowed as the motto of the present study, states that the work of Caniaris vacillates “between Brecht and Beckett”. According to this incisive metonymy - and it’s no accident it was taken from the world of theater – the artist’s work moves between the two boundaries, the absurd and social realism. In regard to Brecht, Restany’s observation proved prophetic since this social realism is expressed decisively in Caniaris’ artistic production after 1971. But in terms of the absurd, the French author of New Realism bases his judgement [sic] on clear indications which can be seen in Caniaris’ objects as early as 1963. The artist enhanced his rhetoric with irony, laughter, mockery and parody to reveal the absurdity of human existence. His pessimistic skepticism was focused on basic human conditions, in the dimension lying between the human being and his life, in human nature which is subject to constant change and the wear and tear of time, in the difficulty of communication between human beings and in the depth of their profound loneliness, the tragic contradiction of the love relationship. Melancholic migrations and amputations, plaster-coated bodies and shoes alternating with poetic and lyrical views of human reality, childhood, games, love, to express the fragility of human nature. Moreover, during the same period, his critical foresight turned the artist toward various established social values and conventions, habits of consumption and commands, leading up to the exhibition organized under the Greek dictatorship (New Gallery, 1969) when he moved into an art of condemnation and protest. The increased referentiality of this artistic production, which is being presented as a separate unity in the present exhibition, to the stifling regime of political oppression, which held sway during that period in Greece, oriented criticism, both Greek and European, to a purely political reading. Even though many of the observed morphoplastic actions and materials had already been put to use previously by Caniaris’ artistic system, the plaster-coated human limbs and objects, the barbed wire and the plaster-soaked red carnations now automatically referred to the specific conditions of the deprivations of freedom and to the torture of political prisoners, while at the same time serving as connotations of the liberating power of art vis-à-vis oppressive and crushing political reality. It is of course not by chance that in the history of the critical reception of Caniaris’ work these works stirred the interest of ARC – Musée d’Arte Modern de la ville de Paris, which under the direction of Gaudibert had assumed a clearly sociological orientation, and in the climate of May ’68 promoted the central as well as the regional art of dispute and protest. With the environments of 1971 we observe a shift of the aesthetic experience from the isolated autonomous object to “works in space”. Non-artistic material, which during the previous decade had been used in a complex way and structured in the framework of objects attached to a wall or hanging in space, were now organized into broad wholes, into “syntagms” of sculptural units based on the dimensions of real space, in which they were being presented. Nevertheless, the figurative structure of the environments appeared fragmentary and loose, without uniform chronological and narrative connective tissue. There is also the fact he permitted the sculptural sub wholes to be easily removed from the larger body and to function in new environments. The architectural dimension was incorporated, each and every time, into the logic of the work, as one finds in most works in situ, as it determines the size and the arrangement of the specific sculptural elements. Nevertheless, the real architectural space can be wonderfully alternated, modifying he narrative structure of the work. In this sense, Caniaris’ environments do not constitute closed representative systems. On the contrary, they are open to continual scenic reconstructions – and consequently interpretations – retaining as the constituent element of their structure its open character. We are led to this conclusion by the fact that from exhibition to

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exhibition the composition of these narrative entities is constantly changing, without one being able to appeal to a final or complete form. The open and fragmentary character of these works allows the artist to shift the center of gravity and his critical focus from the development of a single narrative plot to the specific occurrence and conditions. In these metonymies enlargements we recognize realist conventions which are frequently encountered n the cinema and the photodocument of our century. If the deeper motive behind Caniaris’ work, as can be deduced from its evolutionary course, is to penetrate critically, and without any illusory means, into the real and to reconnect art (and its ontology) with historical-social and existential conditions, he has so far achieved this to the greatest degree in his environments. Without completely abandoning representative conventions, such as, for example, the realist puppets, he reduces to the minim the distance between the fictive dimensional likenesses that are processed by the artist’s hand. Furthermore, the sculptural wholes are reduced to a human and everyday scale. Even though the artist will not achieve the complete incorporation of reality, as one finds with happenings and performances produced by other artists, contemporary with him, the boundaries between art and life have become exceptionally blurred and hard to discern. From this point of view, Caniaris achieves his aim of reconsidering the function of art and from the self-satisfied and self-referring activity to which he had been reduced by the late formalism of the Fifties, moved on to establish it a crucial witness and denier of existing socio-economic conditions. In his artistic speculations, the reestablishment of the relationship of art and artist with history in its broad sense entails not only a change in the terms of the production of the work but in the ways of receiving it too. Thus, the static environments which by means of the “theatricalization” of space, come to constitute yet another form of questioning the traditional object of art, expand the field of our perceptual experience and modify the visual relationship of the viewer with the work valid till then, bringing him into more direct contact with it. We are thus given the possibility – theoretically at least – to bodily enter the space of the picture-environment, while at the same time remaining observers – not co-creators – of objects and symbolic conditions and occurrences; we have the impression of a continuity between our own reality and the atmosphere found in the work. Through the sociology of the real, Caniaris renders through his objective testimony various aspects which refer to socio-economic conditions and their repercussions on an individual, national, or geographical level, as well as historical collective memory. The melancholic and tender eye of the artist in Emigrants (1971-6) records – with a rare existential depth in Hopscotch (cat. No. 134) and in a related work, Image (cat. No. 125) – the position of the Greek guest worker, the identity of his national and social origins and the conditions under which he lives through the typical objects of daily life. One would have to view the environment North-South (1973/1988) as a counterpoint to and continuation of this work. Here one finds illustrated in a detached, objective manner, employing certain vivid symbolic elements, the change effected in the standard of living of the Greek and the westernization of his way of life under the regime of the new economic relations between North and South. Caniaris appears to be nostalgic for the naturalistic tradition of the 19

th century, in his large wall painting-environment, Alas Greece or The

Painter and His Model (1980). One could maintain that in this important work, fragments of which will be presented at the retrospective exhibition in a reconstruction in an exterior space, is compressed in an allegorical manner the role and mission which the artist reserved for himself and the critical, representational function of painting. In the figure of the painter in front of the white canvas (cat. No. 150) and the host of references to familiar pictorial subject from Velazquez to Courbet, Caniaris recognizes the artist-witness and the recorder of an objective reality. Turning his back on the material of his testimony, the familiar, typical scenes of public everyday life in modern Greece with the public political orators and the lottery sellers, the apathetic observers of events and illicit readers of newspapers, among the smoking grills, public urinals and communicants of his narrative. In the negative eschatology of this very significant fresco he mocks to the point of derision the decline of history and genuine political conviction, while at the same time parodying the materialist vulgarization of the diachronity of Hellenism.

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Even though it is this era which is responsible for the social and ideological disappointments conveyed in the deconstructionist tropism of his sarcasm and mockery, the awareness of the ultimate boundaries of iconoclastic representation is inscribed in this environment and the rupture becomes apparent in the final works at the exhibition. The white “blank” surfaces, which had already begun to appear by 1981 (Cat. Nos. 163-4, 166) do not constitute a nostalgic reduction, as one might perhaps consider them to be, to the pictorial past. The “eventual painting” as an allegorical tabula rasa, expresses at the same time a rejection and a prospect. It disputes its necessity and its possibility to narrate the real and thus self-abolished as a representative act cedes its place to the selfsame reality of the architectural surface and the object. Whether the return to the wall that in the work of Vlassis Caniaris metaphorically compresses both history and the ontological essence of painting as a figurative art, remains an open question. Is this the end of art or a new beginning? Anna Kafetsi May 1999 Director of the National Center of Contemporary Art Translation: Philip Ramp



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The Committed Avant-Garde of Vlassis Caniaris

Original, engrossing and with multiple levels of significance, the work of Vlassis Caniaris

has enriched the history of the European avant-garde with a special chapter bearing his

own individual stamp. Seeking the stylistic nationality of this creative endeavor, you are

constantly reminded that it is better defined by its differences from the work being produced in the countries adjacent to Greece where he was active, rather than with its

similarities. It is in these differences that the work of Caniaris makes its fundamental

contribution to the history of art, not only in Greece but in Europe as well where this “roving” creator worked for a number of decades.

Following the example of other Greek artists his age, Vlassis Caniaris sought out new horizons at the end of his studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts, outside the stifling

atmosphere of Athens, the first stop being Rome. His interest in materials and indeed

the less conventional ones – wire, metal mesh, plaster – meant he was in harmony with

the quests of Italian artists such as Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri. Let us not forget that real materials have been shown, since the time of the early cubist applications, to be

a sure vehicle of escape from the traditional canvas, and the limits of the frame, even the

two dimensions associated with this space. Nevertheless, the passion for materials which distinguishes the Italian artists we just mentioned had no intention of

transgressing the self-referring character that had been clearly demarcated by the new

abstraction of the Fifties. In addition to the wealth of texture and color it offered, material also permitted artists to capture the gesture in its body, which constituted the new

heresy of abstract expressionism dominated by the New York School.

In his series of work Homage to the Walls of Athens, 1941-19… from 1959 Vlassis Caniaris radically differentiated himself from the “abstract” quests of his fellow artists,

placing his inquiry under the auspices of another kind of speculation. The palimpsest

represented by the walls of Athens, the slogans buried under the whitewash-plaster foreshadow the dominant quests of Caniaris’ mature period: the political and social

concerns informing his work. From this perspective, the Roman period and his early

period in Paris can be seen in the light of preparation. The artist can be observed

methodically developing the codes he will use, not meant to remain at the level of self-reference.

The opportunity and the emotional stimulus, in short, the “kick” he needed would be given him by the dramatic events that were to transpire in Athens: the abolition of

democracy by the dictatorship established by the Colonels in 1967. Vlassis Caniaris’

exhibition at the New Gallery in Athens in May 1969 showed that he had mastered his codes so well that he was able to fashion a language both easy-to-read and

exceptionally forceful, shunning the anecdotal as well as literary mannerisms. The

success of this enterprise was shown by the violent reaction of the regime. The artist

was forced to leave the country, returning to Paris once more.

Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism), the European version of American Pop Art, was all

the rage in Paris. Vlassis Caniaris was in contact with and worked in concert with both the artists and the theoreticians involved with this movement. But his difference from

them is obvious. The main hallmark of New Realism is the attempt to familiarize us with

everyday and industrial objects – usually after they have been used up and discarded – and not with any particular critical or ironic aim point of view, as one finds in Pop Art, but

rather the creation of a new aesthetic object, subversive and unforeseen. And his is why

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I regard Caniaris’ inquiry as radically different from the similar quests of his fellow artists,

both in Rome and in Paris. The presentation of his exhibition with plaster casts and carnations in Paris at ARC was of dual importance: not only did it add a significant

dimension to the Parisian version of New Realism but it also alerted the artistic and

intellectual world to the events taking place in Greece. Vlassis Caniaris managed to

achieve the impossible” he put the codes of the avant-garde to work in the service of a committed message.

The environment would assume similar importance in Emigrants, which was prepared through a grant from the German Exchange Service, and required his residence in Berlin

for two years. This shocking group would be presented in many museums in Germany

as well as in London. The artist symbolically “reproduced” this land of “hospitality” and alienation for the workers who were steaming into Germany, into the advanced industrial

north from the underdeveloped and impoverished south. The figures, clothes,

decoration, the objects and the spaces, chosen with semiological, sociological,

anthropological and psychological criteria in mind, came to make up a space for communication, with multiple, easy-to-read messages. Vlassis Caniaris was an active

witness to history and has displayed great social and political sensitivity. His art could be

characterized as representing the “committed” avant-garde and that does not lessen its artistic value in any way.

The work that Vlassis Caniaris “staged” in the old Fix brewery in 1979-80, with the eloquent title Hélas-Hellas (Word play: Hélas is French for “Alas!”) expanded the range

of his social concerns and illuminated the social alienation and the unconscious

absurdity of the captive masses in contemporary Athens. These are also emigrants in a

certain sense, strangers in a city from which they are trying to escape in vain. Their alienation has transformed them into apathetic spectators not only of history (wall with

slogans) but of their own personal drama as well.

We have devoted less attention to the purely plastic quests of Vlassis Caniaris. The

artist not only exercises absolute control over his forms, materials, colours, textures,

spatial-plastic relations, and the connections between the elements, but also, despite the

intentional poorness of the materials, he persistently aspires to an aesthetic result. The spaces and figures of Vlassis Caniaris are “beautiful”; nothing is left to chance. We need

do nothing more than look at the photographs of his environments again to be aware of

their magic and suggestiveness, which lives on even in their images.

Vlassis Caniaris is considered to be a forerunner of those forms of art which were

destined to become broadly influential on the European art scene, such as Arte Povera. But for me, his great, unparalleled contribution to the history of European art can be

found in the way, during this era, when semiology has triumphed as a theoretical tool of

investigation, he has employed his expressive codes semiologically in order to discover,

illuminate, comment on, judge and condemn the great political and social traumas of our time. The retrospective exhibition of Vlassis Caniaris at the National Gallery will allow us

to relive the various stages of his career and evaluate his contribution to modern art and

our awareness of the problems of our time.

The retrospective exhibition of Vlassis Caniaris was approved by the Administrative

Council of the National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum after the report of the Artistic Committee. We thank the members and the President of the Administrative

Council and the President of the Auditing Department, Mr. Apostolos Botsos. We would

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like to express special thanks to the Minister of Culture, Ms. Elissavet Papazoi for her

support of this exhibition. We would also like to express our gratitude to the exhibition’s sponsor Mr. Zacharias G. Portalakis, President of Brokerage Firm S.A. and member of

the Administrative Council of the National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum.

The exhibition was prepared with customary diligence and sensitivity by Ms. Anna Kafetsi, who was recently appointed Director of the National Center of Contemporary

Art. We thank her and congratulate her warmly.

Marina Lambraki-Plaka

Professor of the History of Art

Director of the National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum

Translation: Phillip Ramp



Caniaris 2014 portfolio

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Transcript of Caniaris 2014 portfolio