Christoforos Savva

Biography

In the last year of his life Savva became absorbed in reliefs whose main material was ordinary sewing needles. The base was a polystyrene board covered with cloth or velvet in various colours; the needles made lines and new levels, and light, breaking on the uneven surface, created an illusion of movement. His last solo exhibition included 14 such works out of the 53 he managed to make.

He had begun very differently.

He was born on 8 June 1924 in Marathovounos, on the Mesaoria plain, the second of six children. Like most village children of those years, he finished only primary school and began helping with farm work; as a child he showed no interest in drawing. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the Cyprus Regiment of the British Army. The regiment was sent to Egypt and Italy, and there the young soldier began visiting museums. He may also have attended drawing courses of the kind often arranged for British servicemen, but this is not firmly established.

In 1947, taking advantage of the benefits for veterans, he moved to Britain. He took lessons at St Martin’s School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and from 1948 studied at Hornsey College of Art, graduating in 1953 or 1954. Few early works are known, so it is hard to judge his first style. The earliest suggest the influence of Cézanne and the Fauves, above all Matisse, and in some pieces the organisation of space moves towards Cubism.

In the summer of 1954 Savva returned to Nicosia, and in November took part in an exhibition for the first time. He showed landscapes and still lifes in oil with a Cubist division of colour zones. In December 1955 he opened his first solo exhibition at the Ledra Palace Hotel, and at the end of 1955 or the beginning of 1956 he was among the founders of the Pancyprian Union of Friends of the Arts, which brought together young painters, writers and composers. His third solo exhibition opened on 29 March 1956: rounded figures, clear colours, flat stylised faces, a deliberate “naivety”. The painting “Demonstration”, one of the few direct references to the political situation on the island, is built on diagonals and straight lines that create a sense of tension. He himself said that he found life in Cyprus hard and felt lonely there: some artists regarded the new style as decadent.

In April 1956 he returned to London, and two months later went to Paris, to the studio of the sculptor, painter and teacher André Lhote, a friend of Picasso and Braque. Lhote’s influence, in the view of all researchers, was serious: the reduction of forms to geometric figures, with colour as the unifying element. Two paintings of 1955, both called “Couple”, are an example. In July 1957, travelling through London and Venice, Savva came briefly to Cyprus and held three solo exhibitions, at one of which he showed 29 works. He then went back to Paris and travelled to the south of France to paint landscapes in gouache and oil. In a letter he explained that he had given up his earlier plan to return because of the island’s political problems and because of money. Events at home pushed him to paint five canvases under the general title “The Massacre at Kionelli”: strong colour, expressionist drawing, devices of Symbolism, close to abstraction.

In the summer of 1959, a year before independence was proclaimed, he settled in Cyprus for good. Most of the works he now exhibited were abstract. At that time he first showed a wire sculpture, a figure of Don Quixote, alongside stone sculptures, watercolours and three collages. In May 1960, together with the Welsh artist Glen Hughes, he founded the Apophasis Gallery, the first independent professional gallery in Cyprus: exhibitions by local and foreign artists, lectures, plays, films. A year later he opened a tavern of the same name there, which became another meeting place for people in the arts.

Savva himself considered the 1961 exhibition at Apophasis, which Telemachos Kanthos praised highly, a turning point in his work. It included 20 gouaches, two drawings and 13 “yfasmatografies”, as he called his works made of fabric and other materials. He constantly tried new materials, and these pieces became an important part of his output. Some works remained Cubist, others, such as “Figs”, leaned towards naive art, in which both Matisse and Cypriot tradition can be seen. The next year he showed an exhibition called “New York”, where alongside oil and gouache there were works of sackcloth, sand and plaster: “The Poet’s Grave”, “Winter Landscape”, “Garden in Nicosia”, “Hot Days”, “Athlete”.

In 1964 he took part in founding the Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts (EKATE). Three years later an enormous “yfasmatografia” of his was offered at an auction in New York; the proceeds were intended for the Abbey of Peace in the village of Bellapais near Kyrenia. He devoted himself more and more to such pieces, sometimes referring to antiquity, if only in their titles: “Shepherd Piper”, “Kouros”. In the same year an exhibition at the Hilton Hotel in Nicosia showed a new turn: his earlier expressionism gave way to geometric figures on flat coloured surfaces. In “Bystander” and “Sibyl” the figures can be dimly made out, while other works are pure geometry. In 1967 he married Christine Waterhouse, and they had a child.

From time to time he returned to wire, making hanging sculptures reminiscent of kinetic art and standing ones close to mobiles. He made textile appliqués and reliefs of cement, glass, mirrors and tesserae, where volume and the look of the material matter, with playful titles such as “The Honest One”, “The Religious One”, “The Queen”. By the end of his life his painting had become entirely abstract, more often geometric; “Composition with Two Circles” (1967) is built on the interplay of planes of colour.

In 1968, at the 34th Venice Biennale, he presented four needle reliefs. Afterwards he wanted to travel around Europe, but felt tired, postponed the trip and went back to his wife in England, where she was expecting their second child. On 13 July 1968 Savva died in Sheffield, aged 44. In 1988, for the twentieth anniversary of his death, the Cypriot Ministry of Education and Culture published the book “The Life and Work of Christoforos Savva”, written by Kostas Economou and the artist’s widow, Christine.