Lot 12 D

Joannis Avramidis dedicated his entire creative oeuvre to the ideal, universally valid human figure of perfect proportions. In keeping with his Greek origins, he takes his inspiration from the models of ancient Greece: the structure of the human figure based on strictly symmetrical, archaic foundations, which resulted in the perfectly proportioned body of classical statues. By intensively studying and drawing nature as well as studying the antique collections of museums around the end of the 1950s, Avramidis acquired his own mathematical construction scheme for the human figure - the sign of a person, so to speak, not in individual form or in movement, but in perfect statics and in hermetic, comprehensive coherence. The artist considered himself as a part of the millennia-old tradition of classical sculpture: “I have the ideal that my work should be as little time-dependent as possible. My ideal conception is that my work could have been created in a different period, in the Early Renaissance or in ancient Greece.” (Joannis Avramidis, as cited in: exhib.cat. Joannis Avramidis, Leopold Museum Wien, Cologne 2017, p.215).
In addition to the individual figures, Avramidis also created groups of figures following his construction scheme. According to his ideal image based on antiquity, they indicate the Greek principal of the “polis”, in other words the city state as an independent unity and community of free individuals. Accordingly, he construed figures standing on common ground as individuals, but in a densely packed group. The spatial density suggests collaborative exchange; the same head height expresses the equality of all. The group of figures thus epitomises a humanistic concept which has lost none of its topicality.