S
otheby’s is excited to announce a solo selling exhibition of paintings by Philip Tsiaras. These curated works all come from the artist’s Topologies series, beginning in the 1990s, which encompasses over 30 years of artistic development. Fusing bold figuration and visceral abstraction, these paintings form part of a complex body of works that together display the artist’s continuously evolving and evocative practice.
Tsiaras ascribes that the artist is the ‘chronicler of his time’ and this is evident across this body of works. During the Gulf War in the 1990s, Tsiaras began painting and drawing the airplanes that flew in the skies above. Speaking of this Tsiaras reflected ‘I wanted to balance the media chaos on canvas and challenge my own perception of war’. What evolved from this was a painterly language filled with layers of pictorial information, mixed with personal fascination in geometricity, specifically topology. Exploring the continuous deformations and stretching of lines, these works examine concepts of space, connectivity and presentation of forms. They are what Tsiaras calls his ‘smart paintings’.
Each painting in this series begins with a detailed geometric substructure, such as an underpainting of diamonds, squares, intersecting and, or, orbs. The artist then goes onto obscure subjects such as planes, heads, vases or a horse, through abstraction, creating a mythological aura through which more unexpected objects emerge.
Embedded across all of the works in Topologies is Tsiaras’ gestural, and intimately illegible, handwriting. Described by the American art critic Donald Kuspit as a form of ‘mysterious calligraphy, not unlike that of Kufic writing in Medieval art’, this cursive further reinforces the deeply personal and emotive quality that underpins the series.
Today, Philip Tsiaras lives and works in New York City. His works are held in both private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim, Germany, the Deste Foundation Museum, Athens and the Vorres Museum, Athens.
