Vasso Katraki - Juvenilia

This exhibition covered the work of eleven Greek artists who were influenced by the major events of the 20th century: WWII, the occupation of Greece by the Germans and the famine that ensued; the Civil War that followed the end of the war, and how it divided the nation; finally the seven years of the military dictatorship that brought so much suffering to the Greek people. 

In the exhibition we were shown how each artist's work developed and changed as they matured and how some moved on to abstraction. I will cover the work of one artist in each post.

Vasso Katraki - Juvenilia at Benaki Museum, Pireos, Athens.

'I live and work with our fishermen, with our farmers, with the landscapes of my motherland, because they are as one with my soul. My constant contact with them helped me understand the material of my artistic creation'. Vasso Katraki.

Vasso Katraki, engraver and painter is renowned for her unique visual language and bold reflection on the human condition. In her art, the human body acquires a distinct symbolic, ideological and political quality, becoming a bearer of collective memory and trauma. Her monumental, elongated, rigid figures transcend mere representation and emerge stripped of any descriptive details, incorporating elements of pre-classical art (Cycladic, Archaic) coupled with modernism.

In her engravings, she initially used wood, a traditional material, but in the final 38 years of her career,  stone - and in particular sandstone - would play a key role in her work. Sandstone is a porous rock that has the capacity to filter and store large quantities of liquid. 

Katraki's earlier themes are very political. The War, the Occupation, the Resistance, and the Civil War take on a central role, with the fishermen of her hometown appearing in her work in the late 1940s, also featuring prominently in her stone engravings over the following decade. The same can also be said of her distinctive mother-figure. The artist became increasingly abstract: her forms ascetic and archetypal. Sterm female figures, bloody suns, wounded horses.

In 1967, the day after the military coup of April 21st, Katrakia was among the first people arrested. Like so many, she was exiled to the island of Gyaros, where she would remain for almost 10 months. Gyaros, or Yioura as the engraver and her fellow prisoners called this uninhabited island in the Cyclades, had served as a place of exile and punitive isolation since Roman times. It was under these conditions that the pebbles on the seashore were painted. The pebbles would be painted with suns or female figures, almost always smiling - a feature completely absent from her earlier female forms and from the later, almost formalistic figures that she would carve into stone during the period immediately after her inprisonment and exile. Katraki would send painted pebbles of girls and suns to her eight-year-old twin children - small offerings of hope and love.

I am sorry about the quality of the photographs. I tried taking them from all kinds of different angles, but unfortunately could not prevent reflections on some of the works.

Aetoliko, Summer 1942, (This is How the Germans Punish), 1942, (pencil on rice paper)

Athens 1944, 1952, (woodcut on rice paper)

Funeral During the Occupation, 1943, (woodcut on paper)

Demonstration during the Occupation, 1943, (woodcut on paper)

Women at the Olive Grove, 1941-42, (oil on canvas)

The Poor and Deadbeat life of Fishermen, 1950, (woodcut on paper)

detail

detail

detail

Representation, 1970, (engraving on stone)

Forest, 1972, (stone mold)





Aurae and Icarus, 1984, (engraving on stone)
 

To see more of Katrakis' work you can go here