Joannis Avramidis

Biography

In 1953 Avramidis brought the first sculpture of his life to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a head in quarry stone. Wotruba, on seeing it, immediately called in all his students. Avramidis later recalled that Wotruba had been a stroke of luck for him, although as a teacher he had not really interested him, and by then, having finished his painting course, he had already left the academy.

He was thirty-one, and until then he had thought of himself as a painter.

He was born in Batumi, in the Adjarian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, to a family of Pontic Greeks who had fled the Ottoman Empire. His father, a merchant and ship owner, according to some accounts died in prison in 1937, according to others was sent to Siberia and never returned. In that same year, 1937, Joannis entered the State Art School in Batumi. His studies lasted two years: in 1939 his mother left with her four children for Greece, first to Athens and then to the north of the country. The ancient remains of Athens, which he saw as a teenager, later became the basis of his projects: the polis, the temple, the agora.

In 1943, at the age of twenty-one, he was taken to Vienna for forced labour at a railway repair works in the Simmering district. After the war the Soviet occupation authorities considered him suspicious because he knew Russian and sent him to a camp near Budapest; he escaped and returned to Vienna. From 1945 to 1949 he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts under Robin Christian Andersen, alongside Ernst Fuchs and Arik Brauer. Andersen introduced him to the early Renaissance, to Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, and to restricting the palette to local colours. As early as 1948 he made his first “Cubic Heads”, in charcoal. In 1955 he spent a short time in Paris.

In 1956, after finishing Wotruba’s sculpture class, he received the academy’s State Prize, the first of many awards. In the same year his work was shown at the Venice Biennale, and in 1957 his first solo exhibition took place at the Galerie Würthle in Vienna. From 1956 he pursued the “absolute figure”, drawing on Classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. His bronze “Large Figure” of 1958 was the first to be built as a fused column: arms and body merged into a closed shape. From single figures grew groups, always of an odd number, faceless, static and stern; the art historian Werner Hofmann described this manner as “the rhythm of severity”. In 1963 the “Columns” appeared, and in the 1990s the “Column of Humanity”, 13.22 metres high, clearly related to Constantin Brâncuși’s “Endless Column”.

Of the projects “Polis”, “Temple” and “Agora”, only the first was realised: “Polis” (1965–1968) was erected on the terrace of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. “Temple” and “Agora” remained sketches and models, and he worked on “Temple” until the end of his life.

In 1962, at the 31st Venice Biennale, he showed 22 sculptures together with Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Alberto Giacometti, who won the Grand Prize for Sculpture there, praised them for their “quality and drama”. Then came documenta III (1964) and documenta 6 (1977) in Kassel. In 1965–66 Avramidis headed the class in life drawing at the Vienna academy, in 1966–67 he taught in Hamburg, and from 1968 to 1992 he ran the masterclass in sculpture. His students included Reinhard Puch and Wolfgang Götzinger. He was a member of the Vienna Secession. In Hamburg the “Band Figures” appeared, the opposite of the closed columns: they seek movement and openness of space. Later he made many heads, ever more abstract: a smooth skull on a powerful neck, without eyes, mouth or nose, and in “Head with Deep Spatial Surfaces” only two sharp wedges.

He never showed his paintings during his lifetime. Canvases in earthy reds and steely blues, portraits of friends and the series “Suns”, made of coloured circles, were found in his studio after his death; they were exhibited in 2022. To my mind, this changes the way we see the sculptor: he seems never to have stopped being a painter.

In 1973 he received the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Arts, with a laudatory speech by Wotruba. In 1997 a retrospective was held at the National Gallery in Athens, after which the artist gave the museum all the works shown: 53 sculptures, 11 paintings and 104 drawings. He was a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens (1998) and of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (2000). In 2013 he was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria.

Avramidis died in Vienna during the night of 16 January 2016, aged 93. In 2017 a retrospective was held at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, and the “Column of Humanity” was temporarily erected on the square of the MuseumsQuartier.