Joannis Avramidis (born 23 September 1922, Batumi – 16 January 2016, Vienna) was a contemporary Greek-Austrian painter and sculptor. He was born in Batumi, on the Black Sea, in the Adjarian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, an Autonomous Republic of the former Soviet Union (in present-day Georgia), to a family of Pontic Greeks, who had fled the repression of ethnic minorities in the Ottoman Empire in the turmoil leading up to the Greco-Turkish War.

Life and career

He began studying painting at the State Art School of Batumi in 1937, the same year his father had violently died in prison as a victim of ethnic repression by Stalin's henchmen. Alas, his studies came to a premature end in 1939 when the whole family (i.e. his mother and her 4 children) had to re-emigrate again, this time to Greece, due to the USSR's sustained policy leading to ethnic cleansing. After living 4 difficult years in Greece, first in Athens and later in Northern Greece, he was conscripted in 1943, as a 21-year old, during the Axis occupation of Greece, and deported to Vienna, Austria, to work in forced labour at the train repair shop "Eisenbahnausbesswerungswerken Kledering" (Simmering district) maintaining railway vehicles for the National Socialist's regime. Once the Second World War had come to an end, Avramidis was categorised as suspicious by the Soviet occupation authorities in Vienna due to his knowledge of Russian and deported to an internment camp near Budapest. However, he managed to escape and return to Vienna. There Avramidis began studying painting as a regular student in the masterclass of Robin Christian Andersen (1890–1969), from 1945 till 1949, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (in German : Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien). Fellow academy students were a.o. Ernst Fuchs, Erich (later called Arik) Brauer, Giselbert Hoke and Kurt Absolon. Somewhat fortuitously, in 1953, having finished art school a couple of years earlier, his talents as a sculptor were discovered by Fritz Wotruba, which led him, at the age of 31, to attend Wotruba's sculpture classes at the same academy, from 1953 to 1956. Upon graduation in 1956, Avramidis received the Staatspreis der Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Wien, his first honorary award of many. "«Wotruba war ein Glücksfall für mich, dabei interessierte er mich eigentlich gar nicht als Lehrer. Außerdem hatte ich die Akademie schon verlassen. Aber dann kam ich mit einem Kopf an die Akademie, Wotruba holte sofort seine gesamte Schülerschaft.» (in German); Translation : «Wotruba was a stroke of luck for me, although I wasn't really interested in him as a teacher. Besides, I had already left the academy. But then I came to the academy with a head and Wotruba immediately brought in his entire student body.»" Ten years later, he returned to his Alma mater to become a professor until his retirement in 1992 : At the academy he worked closely together with Heimo Kuchling, an art theorist who initiated and taught the subject "Morphology of the Fine Arts" (in German : Morphologie der Bildenden Kunst). Avramidis was a member of the Wiener Secession. In 1962 Avramidis made the acquaintance of Alberto Giacometti at the 31st Biennale in Venice, where he represented Austria together with Friedrich (who later called himself Friedensreich) Hundertwasser. His 22 sculptures were praised for their "quality and drama" by Giacometti, who had been awarded a grand solo show at the art event for which he received the Grand Prize for Sculpture that year. Franco Russoli, a friend of Giacometti and director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, later expanded on this comment by recognising in the work of Avramidis "the constantly recurring image of loneliness, the search for a refuge in the embrace of people locked in their own inability to communicate". Avramidis later participated in documenta III (1964) and documenta 6 (1977) in Kassel and enjoyed an important number of participations in exhibitions over the years, both solo or in group.

Private life

Joannis Avramidis was the son of the merchant, ship owner and flower grower Konstantin Avramidis and his wife Eleni, who had emigrated to the Russian Tsarist Empire in 1916 in order to escape the oppression of the Greek minority in the Ottoman Empire. His father Konstantin was a Black Sea Greek whose family had lived in Georgia for generations. Joannis Avramidis had three younger siblings: Georgette, Thomas and Sofia. From the late 1960s onwards, Thomas often helped with fabricating his brother's sculptures. In 1952 Avramidis wed Waltraud Rathofer, a restoration expert, whom he divorced in 1955, the same year he officially became an Austrian citizen. In 1962 he married a fellow art student, another pupil of Wotruba, Annemarie Avramidis née Persche (Vienna, 1939–2013). They had a daughter Julia Frank-Avramidis (* 1969), who is also a painter. After the death in 2014 of his wife Annemarie, a poet and accomplished sculptor in her own right, he completely withdrew from public life, and during the night of January 16, 2016, Joannis Avramidis died at the age of 93, in Vienna, surrounded by his family.

Artistic development and style

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 and intimistic subjects that are suggestive of a certain penchant for melancholy and a proximity to Pittura metafisica. Andersen taught him the importance of composition and of reducing the painter's palette to local colours. 1948 was the year Avramidis made his first set of "Kubische Köpfe" (Cubic Heads) in charcoal. After his graduation in 1949 as a painter, he began a further study in the Masterclass for Conservation and Technology taught by Robert Eigenberger (1890–1979).

A new vocation as sculptor

In 1953, Avramidis made his first sculpture, a "Kopf" (Head), 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. In 1955, he spent some time studying in Paris, where he became friends with the poet and translator Jean-Claude Hemery (1931–1985). 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. "«Ich habe das Wunschbild, daß meine Arbeit so wenig wie möglich zeitabhängig ist. Meine Idealvorstellung ist, daß ich meine Arbeit auch in einer anderen Zeit hätte machen können, etwa in der Frührenaissance oder in der antiken Archaik.» (in German) Translation : «I would like my work to be as timeless as possible. My ideal vision is that I could have made my work in a different era as well, for example in the early Renaissance or the ancient archaic period.»" 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. 1957 marked the year during which Avramidis got his first solo show, at the renowned Galerie Würthle (est. 1865, since 1881 active in Vienna), 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.

Figuren and Saülenfiguren

While Avramidis' 1958 bronze sculpture "Modellierte Figur" (Modelled Figure) 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. From a single Figur he quickly evolved into creating a series of Figurengruppen (Groups of Figures), clustering the individual figures tightly into a fused block of figures. The groups always concern an uneven number of figures. In Avramidis' distinct style épuré (purist style), all the figures are faceless, anonymous, static and stern, which would lead Werner Hofmann to describe Avramidis' style as "Der Rhythmus der Strenge" (the Rhythm of Severity). In 1963 Avramidis made a sculpture entitled "Saülen" (Columns) for the first time. Another version from 1963, "Modell für eine Säule II" (Model for a Column II) 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), during the 1990s, work that is clearly influenced by Constantin Brâncuși's Endless Column.

Polis, Tempel and Agora

During the 1965-66 academy year, when he had taken over the Class for Nude Drawing (in German : Klasse für Aktzeichnen) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from Herbert Boeckl (1894–1966), he began working on "Polis", 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, Temple and Agora are all topoi that stem from his encounter as an adolescent boy with the impressive remnants of Greek antiquity in Athens during the years of hardship spend in exile in Greece with his family. These formative years led him to discover his ancestral roots as a "Hellene", a persona that would guide him through all of his career.

Bandfiguren

In 1966, Avramidis started making a new type of sculptures, called "Bandfiguren" (Band Figures) — as an antithesis to his closed upright "Säulenfiguren"—, during his tenure as visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. 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): 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.

Kopffiguren

A recurring topos in Avramidis' oeuvre is the human head, in an often highly stylised, upright, even stern representation which is crystallising into total abstraction. This makes one think that Avramidis was not only imbued by Brâncuși's approach to sculpting heads, but sometimes willing to take the abstraction one step further. As in his Figuren, features that are usually associated with the facial recognition of an individual person such as eyes, mouth, nose or ears cannot be distinguished in a lot of the sculptures or the drawings & paintings he produced over the years. 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 a 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. "Kopf mit tiefenräumlichen Flächen I" (Head with Deep Spatial Surfaces I), from 1969/70, a version of which is shown in a courtyard at the German Bundestag, boldly offers a dramatic counterpoint to the previously rounded shapes. Here, Avramidis goes for even greater spatial reduction by opting for only 2 strong wedge-shaped forms, with almost razor-sharp angular edges, representing just the skull and neck. 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. In 1999, an exhibition dedicated solely to Avramidis' Heads was organised by Galerie Thomas. In 2003, he conceived of "Rechter Halbkopf" (Right Semi-Head), going back to the same mixed media technique used in 1970 on "Kopf - Das trojanische Pferd" (Head - The Trojan Horse).

Baum and Mensch-Baum

Another theme Avramidis often came back to are "Baüme" (Trees) and its anthropomorphic derivative "Mensch-Baüme" (Man Trees), pouring the morphing of Man into Tree in bronze.

Always a painter

During his lifetime Avramidis deliberately never exhibited any of his painted work to the public. Only after his demise, a number of paintings have emerged from the artist's estate, now run by his daughter Julia. A surprising 2022 gallery show "Paintings & Sculptures" shed a new light on the artist and his complete oeuvre. Some rather compelling paintings in earthy reds or steely blues accompany or even re-invigorate the understanding of well known sculptures as they offer a different view of the inner thinking of Avramidis. Other paintings open up the private world of his restricted circle of friends for whom he apparently loved making portraits, such as Klaus Demus (1983) or the architect Roland Rainer (1987). He also drew portraits of the poet Michael Guttenbrunner (1983), 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: "«Nichts ohne die Erfrischung durch die Unmittelbarkeit der lebendigen Anschauung.» (in German) Translation: «Nothing without the invigoration by means of the immediacy of living contemplation.»" 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

"«Avramidis ist nicht nur 'die' Begabung seiner Generation in Österreich, er ist es sicherlich auch in Deutschland, und er gehört zu den wenigen großen Bildhauern unserer Zeit.» (in German) Translation : «Avramidis is not only 'the' talent of his generation in Austria, he is certainly also 'the' talent of his generation in Germany, and he is one of the few great sculptors of our time.»"

Exhibitions

Sculpture in public and private collections

Several museums, private and public institutions hold work of Avramidis in their collections, such as:

Sculpture in open air

Austria

Belgium

Germany

Greece

The Netherlands

Public and private collections

Auction houses and galleries

Art festivals

Various

Stamp

A special edition postage stamp was created in 2018 by the Austrian Postal Service (in German : Österreichische Post) featuring Joannis Avramidis's Großer Kopf (Large Head), part of the series „Moderne Kunst in Österreich“ (Modern Art in Austria).

Trivia

Notes and references