Giorgos Bouzianis

Estate of the artist

Painted circa 1926.

The present work differs from conventional portraiture by virtue of its dynamic brushstrokes, and tonal qualities, which imbue the painting with great intensity. Bold planes of rich colours delineate light and shadow and foreshortening with only the most perfunctorily direct reference to the subject of the portrait. This work vividly illustrates a step in the artist's aesthetic and emotional journey from representation to unadulterated expression; a preoccupation with colour over form and the articulation of feeling over subject is already visible.

Widely regarded as Greece's leading expressionist painter, Bouzianis was deeply influenced by the avant-garde currents with which he came into contact while in Munich from 1907-1934. Whilst in Germany, Bouzianis became associated with the two groups of Expressionist painters Die Brücke - which counted among its members Kirchner, Schmitt-Rottluff, Pechstein and Nolde, and Der blaue Reiter, led by Kandinsky and Franz Marc. These painters explored the passage to a more spiritual existence and the expression of human feeling in the light of what they saw as an encroaching destructive industrial civilization.