Yiannis Spyropoulos

Yiannis Spyropoulos became known in his homeland as the poet of abstraction. Having experimented with various styles that evolved artistically over a period of time, Spyropoulos' work reached maturity in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. It is in the works from this period that space and form begin to constitute a unity, and it was by virtue of them that he introduced abstract art to Greece.

In works such as the present one Spyropoulos created pictorial space and texture by using scraps of paper, burnt objects, wax and coated collages accentuated by colour, which became the corporal substance of his painting. These compound ingredients formed both the pictorial space and theme of his works, and imbued them with dramatic expression, blending architectural structure with pure form and colour.

In his mature abstract period, Spyropoulos was no longer composing a different image of the objective world, but was breaking up the specific - not in the endeavor to reveal formless chaos, but in order to reveal the appearance of the inner structure of the material world. Similarly, the present work can be seen to have evolved around a research into the painting process, emphasizing the lyrical and poetic manipulation of surface and texture without any representational implications, shaping a visual language.