Joannis Avramidis

Beginnings as painter The teachings of Professor Andersen at the Academy (1945–1949) introduced Avramidis to early Renaissance painters such as Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. As a student, he painted small landscapes out of quarry stone (now in the collection of the National Gallery, Athens). He showed this work to Fritz Wotruba, who had been teaching in Vienna since his return from exile in Switzerland. Wotruba's enthusiasm led him to accept Avramidis into his sculpture class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and award a private studio space to Avramidis to work in for the duration of his studies. Fellow students were : Andreas Urteil, Alfred Hrdlicka, Alfred Czerny, Erwin Reiter, Franz Anton Coufal, Leopold Höfinger, Roland Goeschl and Oswald Oberhuber. While his 1954 bronze sculpture "Kleine Halbfigur" (Small Half-Figure) is still embedded in the Wotruba tradition with its additive, cubist construction, other bronze sculptures such as "Torso" and "Kopf" (Head) mark the beginnings of an independent development towards the calculated multi-axiality of the figure. The tendency towards exact segmentation of the limbs can be observed particularly in the nude drawings and proportion schemes for sculptures. Since 1956, his graduation year, the search for the absolute figure stands at the centre of his work. Consequently, two eras serve as sources of inspiration for the artist, eras in which the figure and its proportions were held as the measure of all things. These are the Classical Antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. Avramidis allows the borders between abstraction and figurative depiction to merge in his sculptures. Softly rounded curves suggest the human body without defining it, whilst various profile views are fanned out, as though blurred. In 1959, he was invited by commissioner Josef Musil to participate with a stone sculpture, "Figur“ (Figure), and a bronze sculpture, "Studie“ (Study), in the Austrian selection for the 28th Venice Biennale (16 June – 21 Oct 1956), where work of eleven other Austrian painters and sculptors was shown in the elegant National Pavilion designed by Josef Hoffman. and when he developed the first sketches for sculptures based on mathematical calculations, such as "Bein" (Leg), a bronze. It is also the year in which he made the acquaintance of Annemarie Persche, who would later become his second wife. was still modelled after an Ancient Greek kouros, his "Große Figur“ (Large Figure) from the same year was the first sculpture to consistently define the body as a coupled column, where limbs and body are fused together in a closed shape. In his modular Figuren-sculptures, Avramidis was to reduce the anthropomorphic to its most elemental form, thus testing one of his key design principles for the following decades and creating Avramidis' signature style. shows the principle of stacking a single Figur or a Figurengruppe with the same, but inverted, Figur or Figurengruppe, thus creating a mirrored columnar effect which could then be replicated endlessly. This process would ultimately be leading Avramidis to conceive his magnum opus, the "Humanitas-Saüle" (Column of Humanity), a further evolution of the Figurengruppe, and made the initial sketches for "Tempel" (Temple), a never realised project Avramidis pursued till the end of his life. He made a number of preparatory sketches and models such as "Tempel in Olympia", 1963 – 1974, or "Tempel – Modellierte Figur", which evolved from the Polis-group into a circular wall of columns, with the 1958 bronze "Modellierte Figur" projected to stand in the centre of the large-scale "Tempel" sculpture. "Agora" was another, even grander, project that never made it to realisation, although Avramidis' sketches and sculpture studies can give us a glimpse of what was intended. In one drawing from 1972 he imagined a giant Head to be surrounded by individual figures or group figures. Polis, They generally come in three typical formal declinations: Orthogonale Bandfiguren (Rectangular Band Figures) and Bandfiguren in the form of Kantprofile (Edge Profiles) or Rundprofile (Round Profiles): from 1966 to 1969, "Sitzende Bandfigur" (Seated Band Figure) from 1983 and "Kämpfer" (Fighter) from 1967 to 1986 • examples of a Bandfigur (Rundprofil) are "Sitzende Figur" (Seated Figure) from 1983, and a new development : the "Halbprofile" (Half Profiles), • In the late 1960s, Avramidis started drawing "Rectangular Figures" to be made into aluminium sculptures such as "Figure (Rectangular Figure)", from 1970. Art historian Prof. Dr. Christa Lichtenstern, writes about the Bandfiguren as being "centrifugal, in opposite direction: it stands under the guiding type of the ribbon (i.e. band) and increasingly seeks mobility and openness of space.", in contrast to the Saülenfiguren. All that remains are smooth (i.e. untextured), rounded, reduced shapes representing the oblong form of a skull, firmly attached to a strong, muscular neck, and sometimes a more prominent chin or the suggestion of hair mass, as can be witnessed in "Kopf 2" (Head 2) and "Kopf IV" (Head IV), both from 1959, "Kopf" (Head), from 1961 to 1970, "Kopf II" (Head II), from 1965, and "Stirn-Kinn Kopf" (Forehead-Chin Head), from 1971. "Kopf IV [3 Stadien]" (Head IV [3 Stages]), from 1959, and "Assymetrical Head", from 1960, are both intriguing works showing three evolving phases in the construction of a head. The 3 heads are made respectively of an aluminium lattice-work construction, an aluminium lattice-work construction filled in with plaster, and, finally, a bronze, presented together on a single aluminium plaque. "Head-Rhombus" is an atypical head from 1967, in stainless steel, which Avramidis rarely used. "Kopf – Das trojanische Pferd" (Head – The Trojan Horse), from 1970, changes course again both in shape as in materiality by resorting to the use of an orange-tinged synthetic resin filled in on an aluminium lattice-work construction. A similar shape exists also in bronze: "Kopf, das trojanische Pferd" (Head, the Trojan Horse). "Großer Kopf" (Large Head), a large bronze from 1970, is other proof of the artistic design parameters used in Avramidis' work concerning harmony, symmetry and proportion, but, this time, a distinctive nose, mouth, chin and the subtle suggestion of eyes are clear identifiers of the human head. Another version, "Kopf mit tiefenräumlichen Flächen III" (Head with Deep Spatial Surfaces III), also from 1969/70, adds a third form, a trapezoidal prism, suggestive of a nose. Avramidis also produced Rectangular Figure or Band Figure heads such as "Head Front Side (Rectangular Head)", from 1968, in aluminium, and "Bandkopf II" (Band Head II), from 1981/82, in solid aluminium. During the 1990s Avramidis painted or drew a number of iterations on the Köpfe-theme and made a new type of an egg-shaped bronze head in 1996. going back to the same mixed media technique used in 1970 on "Kopf – Das trojanische Pferd" (Head – The Trojan Horse). his brother Thomas (1969) and of himself, in versions dating back to 1970 and 1990, all donated to the National Gallery of Greece. From the 1980s onwards, Avramidis also painted a series of unusual colour studies, termed "Sonnen" (Suns), abstractions within the confines of a pure circular form, often on a white background. In the eye of the beholder, they're evidently alien to the rest of his oeuvre, or are they not ...? We may never know why Avramidis made such precise colour studies when his sculptures were generally devoid of colour. He even started painting landscapes, from memory, reminiscent of his walks in the Prater park between the sculptors’ building of the Academy of Fine Arts and the state studios in the Krieau area where he worked. In these landscapes the return to the figurative is unexpected, as the connection to the sculptural works is not in terms of form, rather in the principle that he always stressed, as far back as 1962 at the Venice Biennale: It can be concluded Avramidis never ceased to be a painter after all, even as he gained fame through his sculptures during his lifetime. Undoubtedly the attraction lay in the fact that the act of painting or drawing is performed rapidly, almost instinctively, while sculpture, especially the cerebral type Avramidis committed to, requires time, reflection and nearly as much preparatory work as architecture. Notable pupils Austrian sculptors Reinhard Puch (* 1947) and Wolfgang Götzinger (1944–2015) trained under Prof. Avramidis at the Akademie. ==Honours and awards==