Lot 13 D

The ideal of a universally valid human figure with perfect proportions dominates the artistic work of Joannis Avramidis. From the intense study from nature and archaic and classical antique statues, the artist constructed his own mathematical proportion schema of the human figure towards the end of the 1950s, and thus arrived at an eternally valid symbol of man - static, de-individualised, and all-seeingly self-contained. He transposes this perfectly proportioned form as a single figure but also in multi-figure groups, guided by utopian ideals of Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, according to which human existence and community are characterised by freedom, justice and harmony.
Avramidis' works are equally abstract and figural. “Fundamentally, every artwork is in reality 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 points out (quoted after: exhib.cat. Joannis Avramidis, Leopold Museum, Vienna 2017, n.p.). The degree of abstraction is heightened in the Humanitassäule (Humanitas Column), a pictorial idea the artist developed in the mid-1960s. Here he places groups of figures closed into a round, in several layers on top of each other, creating a column shaft with a relief surface. The human form is thus completely absorbed into a group of equals. The Humanitassäule were planned as an integral part of a round temple, an architectural project, the conception of which Avramidis elaborated in drawings and models, but which was ultimately never realised.