Yiorgos Avgeros

Avgeros Yiorgos

Born in Chania, Crete in 1953, he received his first art lessons at the G. Markoulakis design school under the painters V. Kelaidis and A. Petroulakis. The 1970s found him in Athens, at the studios of Y. Vogiatzis and V. Korkovelos. In 1981 he went to study in Paris, but in 1982 he left Paris and settled in Chania permanently. During 1985-1992 he engaged in jewel-making. During the 2000s he engaged with painting without abandoning the three-dimensional, constructional side of his work. He has presented his works in more than ten solo exhibitions and has participated in many group shows. He passed away in 2022.

Works

Solo Exhibitions

2019

Cognitive Wandering Zoumboulakis Galleries Athens

2016

Alma Contemporary Art Gallery Trikala

2015

Mylonoyanni Art Gallery Chania

2014

Zoumboulakis Galleries Athens

2013

Third Dimension Alma Contemporary Art Gallery Trikala

2009

Mylonoyanni Art Gallery Chania

2007

Tree-forest Zoumboulakis Galleries Athens

2003

Constructions Tzamia-Krystalla Art Gallery Chania

2002

Constructions Zoumboulakis Galleries Athens

1998

Yiorgos Avgeros Titanium Gallery (Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery) Athens

1995

Yiorgos Avgeros Mylonoyanni Art Gallery Chania

1995

Titanium Gallery (Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery) Athens

1992

Jewellery - Sculpture Titanium Gallery (Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery) Athens

Press

Who could have imagined, in the early 1930s, when certain avant garde creators began exploring the possibilities of expression provided by all manner of technical products and creations, through assemblage or collage, that these techniques would reach the point of raising the materials to the level of intellectual creation, or that, through their – deliberate or otherwise – choice and use of emblematic objects, the artists would give a mark of their time. Products and materials of contemporary consumer society, in different configurations, take on an altered shape and meaning and become means of communicating a new created reality.

Thus, in the hands of Yiorgos Avgeros, accessories of contemporary technology – resistors, condensers, transistors, screws, coils, cables, electronic chips – combined with wood, plexiglass, foil, wire, are composed into figures performing an exercise of balance in space, as well as real existential conditions in a constant quest for redefinition and equilibrium.

Using objects whose material and form inspire the concept of sculpture, combined with flexible wire that traces a head or a leg, or even with transparent plexiglass, he creates plastic forms that are ethereal, free of the weight of traditional sculpture, that allow space to penetrate their mass and give a new aesthetic value to the void, which now transforms into an organic element. Thus, useless elements from the field of electronic technology cross over into the field of art and gain recognition through its essence, which is the transformation of dead material into intellectual process.

The human figures of Υiorgos Avgeros are not acrobats, they are seekers of balance. Standing firmly on rods or sheets of metal with automated movements dictated by the elements themselves that comprise the parts of their bodies, they strive to stand in the void and find balance between machine and poetry, between a world that is departing and another that is arriving.

 

Olga Mentzafou-Polyzou
National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum Curator
* From the catalogue of Yiorgos Avgeros’s exhibition at the Titanium Gallery (Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery), Athens, 1995.