Joannis Avramidis Lot n° 13

Joannis Avramidis Small humanitarian column I 1963/1986 Bronze with golden brown patina Height 116 cm. Signature "AVRAMIDIS" and numbering on the plinth. Copy 5/6. Exhibitions Vienna 2012 (Gallery at the Albertina Zetter), Joannis Avramidis, Hommage to the 90th birthday 2012, Ausst.Kat.Nr.24, pp.56/57 with colour illus. (other copy) Athens 1997 (National Gallery, Alexandros Soutzos Museum), Joannis Avramidis (other copy) Literature Werner Hofmann, Joannis Avramidis, The Rhythm of Austerity, Munich 2011, p. 55 with ill. of the artist's studio courtyard at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (other copy). The ideal of an universally valid human figure with perfect proportions dominates the artistic work of Joannis Avramidis. Through intensive studies based on nature and on archaic and classical antique statues, the artist constructed his own mathematical proportion scheme of the human figure towards the end of the 1950s, thus arriving at an eternally valid sign of the human being - static, de-individualized and all-seeingly self-contained. He realizes this perfectly proportioned figure as a single figure, but also in multi-figure groups. He is guided by utopian ideals of Greek antiquity and the Renaissance, according to which human existence and community are characterized by freedom, justice and harmony. Avramidis' works are equally abstract and figurative. "Fundamentally, every work of art is in truth abstract because the act of creation is essentially a process of abstraction. The opposite would be a depictive work, which I do not call creative," he himself elaborates (quoted from: Ausst.Kat. Joannis Avramidis, Leopold Museum Vienna 2017, o.p.). The degree of abstraction is further increased in the Humanitasäule, a pictorial idea that the artist developed in the mid-1960s. Here, he superimposes groups of figures closed into a round on top of each other in several levels, creating a column shaft in relief. The human figure is thus completely absorbed into a group of equals. The Humanitas columns were planned as part of a round temple, an architectural project whose conception Avramidis elaborated in detail in drawings and models, but which was ultimately not realized.