events

11.02.2023 - 01.04.2023

FASSIANOS

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5vie selection

physical event

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Tommaso Calabro

Piazza San Sepolcro, 2

hours

12.00 - 18.00

Tommaso Calabro Gallery is pleased to announce "Fassianos," an exhibition dedicated to Alekos Fassianos (1935-2022), among the most celebrated and influential artists of the Greek art scene. The exhibition coincides with the opening of the Alekos Fassianos Museum in Athens in a modernist building designed in the 1990s by the artist himself together with architect Kyriakos Krokos. 


"Fassianos" is the first solo exhibition dedicated to the artist in Italy, more than 40 years after the exhibition organized by Alexander Iolas at the Paolo Barozzi Gallery in Milan in 1976. With this exhibition, Galleria Tommaso Calabro continues and deepens its research on the work of Iolas, one of the most important gallery owners of the second half of the twentieth century, and on the artists close to Surrealism, who also thanks to his visionary intuition had a way to establish themselves among the general public. The "Fassianos" exhibition consists of more than 30 paintings and works on paper made by the artist from the late 1960s to the 2000s, as well as a selection of rare design pieces. Born in Athens to a musician father and Greek teacher mother, Fassianos interweaves memory and mythology, sacred and profane, in his works through imagery that, while laden with references to Greek culture, transcends the personal and is of immediate, universal understanding. The undisputed protagonist is color, which, in the intense shades of blue and red, in the ancient shades of pink and green, and again in silver and gold, spreads across the canvases to form bodies and faces, and then wings, swallows and flowers.


Fassianos's figures, androgynous and hieratic, at times docile and at other times terrifying, surface from the artist's childhood memories, in a rarefied and imaginative dimension in which the bodies of passers-by merge with profiles of the classical age and Byzantine mosaics; those same ones that Fassianos used to admire as a child during his many visits to museums and churches with his scholarly mother and his grandfather the priest. Whether men, angels or gods, what distinguishes Fassianos' characters are the details: the striped shorts, the pearl necklaces, the thick wings like those of pigeons. Mingled together, they each live out their joys and sins in a world that is not so different from our own: a kiss, a drink on the terrace, a bicycle ride, their hair stirred by the hot summer wind. Fassianos was an extremely multifaceted artist. The same iconographic imagery of his paintings can be found in his design pieces, made of the most diverse materials, from wood to bronze, from rattan to ceramics: elegant and eclectic works with a dreamlike aesthetic imbued with lyricism. The Gallery thanks the Alekos Fassianos Estate in Athens for making this exhibition possible and the Carwan Gallery in Athens for its support in including design pieces by the artist in the exhibition.