Joannis Avramidis

Joannis Avramidis (Greek: Iωάννης Aβραμίδης; born 23 September 1922, Batumi – 16 January 2016, Vienna) was a contemporary Greek-Austrian painter and sculptor. He was born in Batumi, on the Black Sea, in the Adjarian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, an Autonomous Republic of the former Soviet Union (in present-day Georgia), to a family of Pontic Greeks, who had fled the repression of ethnic minorities in the Ottoman Empire in the turmoil leading up to the Greco-Turkish War.

Life and career He began studying painting at the State Art School of Batumi in 1937, the same year his father had violently died in prison as a victim of ethnic repression by Stalin's henchmen. Alas, his studies came to a premature end in 1939 when the whole family (i.e. his mother and her 4 children) had to re-emigrate again, this time to Greece, due to the USSR's sustained policy leading to ethnic cleansing. After living 4 difficult years in Greece, first in Athens and later in Northern Greece, he was conscripted in 1943, as a 21-year old, during the Axis occupation of Greece, and deported to Vienna, Austria, to work in forced labour at the train repair shop "Eisenbahnausbesswerungswerke Kledering" (Simmering district) maintaining railway vehicles for the National Socialist's regime. Once the Second World War had come to an end, Avramidis was categorised as suspicious by the Soviet occupation authorities in Vienna due to his knowledge of Russian and deported to an internment camp near Budapest. However, he managed to escape and return to Vienna. There Avramidis began studying painting as a regular student in the masterclass of Robin Christian Andersen (1890–1969), from 1945 till 1949, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (in German : Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien). Fellow academy students were a.o. Ernst Fuchs, Erich (later called Arik) Brauer, Giselbert Hoke and Kurt Absolon. Somewhat fortuitously, in 1953, having finished art school a couple of years earlier, his talents as a sculptor were discovered by Fritz Wotruba, which led him, at the age of 31, to attend Wotruba's sculpture classes at the same academy, from 1953 to 1956. Upon graduation in 1956, Avramidis received the Staatspreis der Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Wien, his first honorary award of many.

«Wotruba war ein Glücksfall für mich, dabei interessierte er mich eigentlich gar nicht als Lehrer. Außerdem hatte ich die Akademie schon verlassen. Aber dann kam ich mit einem Kopf an die Akademie, Wotruba holte sofort seine gesamte Schülerschaft.» (in German); Translation :

«Wotruba was a stroke of luck for me, although I wasn't really interested in him as a teacher. Besides, I had already left the academy. But then I came to the academy with a head and Wotruba immediately brought in his entire student body.» Ten years later, he returned to his Alma mater to become a professor until his retirement in 1992 :

1965/66 : Head of the Class for Nude Drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria 1966/67 : Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg, Germany 1968–1992 : Head of the Masterclass for Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria. At the academy he worked closely together with Heimo Kuchling, an art theorist who initiated and taught the subject "Morphology of the Fine Arts" (in German : Morphologie der Bildenden Kunst). Avramidis was a member of the Wiener Secession. In 1962 Avramidis made the acquaintance of Alberto Giacometti at the 31st Biennale in Venice, where he represented Austria together with Friedrich (who later called himself Friedensreich) Hundertwasser. His 22 sculptures were praised for their "quality and drama" by Giacometti, who had been awarded a grand solo show at the art event for which he received the Grand Prize for Sculpture that year. Franco Russoli, a friend of Giacometti and director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, later expanded on this comment by recognising in the work of Avramidis "the constantly recurring image of loneliness, the search for a refuge in the embrace of people locked in their own inability to communicate". Avramidis later participated in documenta III (1964) and documenta 6 (1977) in Kassel and enjoyed an important number of participations in exhibitions over the years, both solo or in group.

Private life Joannis Avramidis was the son of the merchant, ship owner and flower grower Konstantin Avramidis and his wife Eleni, who had emigrated to the Russian Tsarist Empire in 1916 in order to escape the oppression of the Greek minority in the Ottoman Empire. His father Konstantin was a Black Sea Greek whose family had lived in Georgia for generations. Joannis Avramidis had three younger siblings: Georgette, Thomas and Sofia. From the late 1960s onwards, Thomas often helped with fabricating his brother's sculptures. In 1952 Avramidis wed Waltraud Rathofer, a restoration expert, whom he divorced in 1955, the same year he officially became an Austrian citizen. In 1962 he married a fellow art student, another pupil of Wotruba, Annemarie Avramidis née Persche (Vienna, 1939–2013). They had a daughter Julia Frank-Avramidis (* 1969), who is also a painter. After the death in 2014 of his wife Annemarie, a poet and accomplished sculptor in her own right, he completely withdrew from public life, and during the night of January 16, 2016, Joannis Avramidis died at the age of 93, in Vienna, surrounded by his family.

Artistic development and style

Beginnings as painter The teachings of Professor Andersen at the Academy (1945–1949) introduced Avramidis to early Renaissance painters such as Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. As a student, he painted small landscapes and intimistic subjects that are suggestive of a certain penchant for melancholy and a proximity to Pittura metafisica. Andersen taught him the importance of composition and of reducing the painter's palette to local colours. 1948 was the year Avramidis made his first set of "Kubische Köpfe" (Cubic Heads) in charcoal. After his graduation in 1949 as a painter, he began a further study in the Masterclass for Conservation and Technology taught by Robert Eigenberger (1890–1979).

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