Collection's title

Portrait of a woman

Portrait of a woman
Portrait of a woman
Artist
Tetsis Panayiotis
(Hydra 1925 – Athens 2016)
Artist's CV
All artist's collections
CV
Tetsis Panayiotis
(Hydra 1925 – Athens 2016)

The painter and engraver Panayiotis Tetsis was trained at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1943 - 1949) and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris (1953 - 1956). His works are marked by an organised colour interpretation of his subject, whether this is portraiture, or still life, or landscape, as the artist directs his gaze to patterns, forms, colours, light, tones. He succeeds in setting down on the painted surface all the inner character and expressive content of the colour. With pure painting as his aim, he builds his pictures with active planes of rich paint, positioned gesturally and on an equal footing, which vibrate with an endogenous light of the colour which produces the tones and the rhythm. Hydra, the place where he was born and spent his childhood, for which the artist has a special love, occurs repeatedly in his painting as a subject, particularly in the 1990s, when it occupied a significant proportion of his artistic creation.

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Υλικό
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
95X75
Source
Gift of the artist
Description
The rendering of the human figure has systematically preoccupied Tetsis, even in his student days. In Portrait of a Woman, as in other portraits, the artist explores the entity of the woman, whom he reveals through her double nature - the psychic and the physical - as she is shown as monumental with all the mass that she can be lent by the rich black of her dress and the expressiveness of the movement of her hands with the bright tones which stand out against the black. It is with this striking and rich colour range that he also renders the woman's face, which stands out against the bright red of the background, which plays an active role in the composition. Articulated with rectangular levels of colour, it stresses more the curvaceousness of the woman's body, her materiality, her sensuous presence.