Modern Art in Austria - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2018 - 68 Euro Cent

Joannis Avramidis was born in 1922 born today Georgia. About Greece he came in 1943 as a forced laborer to Vienna, where he was after the end of the war at the Academy of Fine Arts Painting and then later sculpture Fritz Wotruba studied. In 1962 he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale and took part in the documenta in 1964 and 1977 in Kassel. The outstanding Artist has received numerous awards, among other things 1985 the Austrian one Decoration for science and art as well as the 2013 Big Golden Decoration with star for merits to the Republic of Austria. He taught the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, for a while also in Hamburg. In 2016, he died at the age of 93 years. In 2017, the Leopold Museum hosted in Vienna a comprehensive retrospective to the work of the sculptor. Looking for the "absolute figure" Joannis Avramidis posed in his works always the people in the center. He aspired to the "absolute Figure". Organic forms like that human body or the head abstracted he based on his personal Principle of construction and created in a universal, timeless Form language its strict, uncompromising Sculptures - mostly columnar, upright figures who from a central axis by variable Circle segment forms to a "skeleton" designed and then in round sculptures were transformed. Greek antiquity and the theory of proportion the Renaissance had great Meaning for the artist. His group of figures "Polis" from 1965/68 takes referring to Plato's utopia of a ideal democratic world: the same great figures are in this sculpture merged into a single entity. Characteristic for Avramidis are also his Head sculptures in many variations: from reduced round bodies to abstract cubic blocks with big ones Surfaces.