Yiannis Gaitis Greek, 1923-1984

After completing his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, Gaitis moved to Paris in 1954 and subsequently divided his time between these two cities. Around 1960 he developed a rich expressionistic vocabulary to fashion biomorphic forms that later gradually evolved into stereotypical human figures. 

Treating this subject over and over again, Yiannis Gaitis became famous for this depiction of 'little men' - figures without specific features that represented man as the product of mass culture, whose behaviour is uniform and predictable, and who remain estranged from their fellows. These little men thus depicted the anonymity, uniformity and sterility of contemporary mass living, which implied the subjugation of individual identity to average communality, and its eventual loss in the nameless mass of the modern world.

The argonauts were a group of fifty-three heroes of divine descent representing the whole of Greece, who joined Jason in his quest to retrieve the golden fleece. In the present work Gaitis has given the subject a modern, idiosyncratic twist.