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 "Eisenbahnausbesswerungswerke 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.
Ten years later, he returned to his Alma mater to become a professor until his retirement in 1992 : 1965/66 : Head of the Class for Nude Drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria 1966/67 : Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg, Germany 1968–1992 : Head of the Masterclass for Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria.
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.Christa Lichtenstern (Hrsg.): Einführung. S. 8. (in German)
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), showing two "Köpfe" (Heads), from 1954 and 1955, belonging to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg 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.
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., Leopold Museum, display of "Modelled Figure" in the midst of half a ring of "Figures", suggesting the never realised "Temple" set-up.
"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):