A Place Called Space: engraving

Showing posts with label engraving. Show all posts

Friday, 2 January 2026

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

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

Tuesday, 13 February 2018

Wildflowers - Giorgis Varlamos

The wild flowers of Giorgis Varlamos at the Byzantine Museum, Athens.

Varlamos' art is inextricably liked with his political activity. During the German occupation of Greece he fought in the Resistance and joined the Communist Party. He was also active during the years of the dictatorship. He had lifelong ties with the Communist Party of Greece to which he bequeathed in a hand written will all of his unsold paintings as well as the contents of his studio. His favourite art form was etching as he considered this 'democratic art' in that it could be original yet accessible to common people.

This exhibition featured oils, watercolours, drawings and engravings of wild flowers. They are exquisite.

I also liked the studies below and wished I could own one:

Wednesday, 13 January 2016

A. Tassos

A. Tassos at the Benaki Museum, Pireos Annex.

A. Tassos studied at the Athens School of Fine arts under the master of Greek engraving, Yannis Kaphallinos. He joined the Greek Communist Party in 1930, and during the Nazi occupation of Greece he joined the National Liberation Front (EAM) creating resistance propaganda material. From 1954 to 1967, while working for the Greek Postal Service, he implemented innovatory techniques in stamp design. In 1959 he became director of the pioneering Department of Graphic Arts at the Technological Institute. In the years of the military junta he lived in self-exile abroad, creating works of social protest.

His work focuses on ordinary people, their everyday lives and their struggles. Until the end of his life he remained faithful to his beliefs and the hope for a new society, a just, democratic, socialist one.