Giorgos Bouzianis (1885-1959)

Of great importance is the presence of Giorgos Bouzianis in the Gallery. The three oils (Portrait of Seated Man and Female Figure) are some of the paintings in which all the exploration and the development of this important Greek expressionist are apparent. G. Bouzianis (1885-1959) completed his apprenticeship in Munich and from an early age found himself in close contact with the evolution taking place in German expressionism, managing to achieve a distinguished European career in the 1920’s. With the rise of nazism, he returns to Greece where he continues his quest in isolation, producing his most significant works. In Portrait of a Seated man (1917), the treatment of the subject remains conventional, despite the fact that the function of color and the brush arerelatively free, according to the expressionist models of the decade. However, in Portrait of Waldmuller, we have the intense appearance of those details of form which with the passing of time will become the personal trademark of the artist: the intensity of the brush-work, and the violent spiritual relationship between the artist and the theme of the painting. This is crystal clear in «Female Figure», where the woman portrayed is merely as a pretext since the main creative work of the artist is to be found in his spiritual relationship with the artistic surface and his means of expression. To these violent brush strokes are now added other intense elements such as rapid finger painting, other chromatic lines with no clear reproductive role, bright colors, so that in the end one has the impression that the picture is the field of expression of the internal spiritual world of the artist and not of the original optical stimulation. The keynotes of this latter work by Bouzianis are also characteristic of postwar American expressionism (De Kouning, Pollock. Rothko, etc.), indeed this great creator could be considered the forerunner of the movement.

copyright 1996-97