Wings
Pavlos (Dionyssopoulos) (1930-2019)
1970 | 74 x 74 x 209 cm
Poster paper and plexiglass
Museum of Contemporary Art
MCA.MMCA.C137
Donation of Chloe Vlioura
ARTWORK DETAILS
Type: Construction
Subject: Plastic arts
ARTWORK DESCRIPTION
Paul's artistic work is one of the most progressive works of those artists who appeared in the 1950s and went abroad to study. Although his explorations may resemble those of pop art and neo-realists, in reality, he did not align himself with any specific movement. From his early works in the late 1950s, he used cuttings from magazine papers as the foundation for his art, and later on, he incorporated posters into his work. He used only new posters, cut into long strips in a cluster, formed and preserved in Plexiglas. A characteristic example of this is the work "Wings" from 1970, which was donated to the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as the work "Cypress" in memory of two prematurely departed children. The use of the poster, with all the conceptual and material implied in its texture, revealed the artistic possibilities of a language of matter that manifests itself simultaneously with the processes of its successive interventions.
CREATOR
Pavlos (Dionysopoulos) was born in 1930 in Filiatra, Messinia. During the period 1949-1953 he studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts in the workshop of G. Moralis. With a scholarship from the French government, he went to Paris in 1954, where he attended classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere. In 1955 he returned to Athens and worked for the theatre and advertising until 1958, when he returned to Paris on a scholarship from the I.K.Y. and settled permanently. There he met P. Restany and the group of "New Realists", who had a catalytic influence on the development of his work. The main material of his work is printed posters, which he uses by mechanically cutting them into strips. He composes them by applying vertical dense overlays and creates at first abstract compositions and then figurative images, three-dimensional objects, flowers and trees, and ends up forming environments and installations in space. Occasionally he used other materials such as kitchen wire and ribbons. He has presented his work in some of the most important art venues in Paris, Brussels, the Kunstverein in Hamburg and Cologne, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, etc. His work "Football Players has been installed at the station of Omonia of the Athens Metro. He represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 1980 and participated in the Europalia (Belgium, 1982), while he took part in important events that promoted Greek avant-garde art abroad, such as Avantgarde Griechenland (1968, Berlin) and Eight Artists, Eight Attitudes, Eight Greeks (1975, ICA, London). In 1997 a major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki. He died in 2019.