Vlassis Caniaris Greek, b. 1928

Since the end of the 1950s, Caniaris, who had lived in Rome, Paris, Berlin and repeatedly in Athens for a period of time, had been working with canvas, plaster, clothes, figures made of wire and all kinds of discarded objects, which he assembled in ways that related to and commented on the then current political conditions. His subjects ranged from the dictatorship in Greece to the consumer-society of the "economic miracle". While Caniaris draws inspiration from ordinary daily life, his work generally operates as an irritable response toward it. Insistent and unshakable in his principles, the artist constantly strives to capture the spirit of the times and accordingly make his criticism with contemporary, political, often subversive works of art.

After completing his studies, Caniaris commenced his career with representational, realistic painting, admittedly not from nature but instead depicting inner, remembered conceptions. His early painterly work and the great picture series "Homage to the Walls of Athens" came about between 1956 and 1960, during his stay in Rome, where he moved after the conclusion of his studies. Following his stay in Rome Caniaris moved to Paris. Working there in the 1960s, he pursued in a highly idiosyncratic way the dissolution of the classical pictorial concept and developed a unique language as object-maker and arranger.

Like many artists at this time, Caniaris experimented with different materials and techniques to extend and define more precisely his pictorial means. Unlike the results of many of his contemporaries, however, Caniaris' works maintained their improvised-tentative character, thus remaining truly recognizable as experiments and thus making evident, for all the completeness and formal confidence they proclaim, that they were a step along the way and not the objective of the artistic effort. (Michael Fehr, The Concrete Realism of Vlassis Caniaris, in: Coloquio 95, Lissabon, 1992, S. 22-33; Wiederabdruck in: ARTI 9/92, Athen 1992, S. 41).