Collection's title

Tree trunks, 1963

Tree trunks, 1963
Tree trunks, 1963
Artist
Vakalo Yorgos
(Constantinople 1902 – Athens 1991)
Artist's CV
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CV
Vakalo Yorgos
(Constantinople 1902 – Athens 1991)

Yorgos Vakalo studied in Paris from 1922 to 1928 at many different schools; he was resident in the French capital for many decades. He was thus in Paris when Surrealism was at its height and was definitively influenced by the movement, initially adopting automatic writing. Vakalo then developed a personal idiom, his subjects replete with poeticism, imagination, lyricism, and bizarre features, like a kind of narration of a tale. The typical elements of his sui generis surrealism are compositions which are enacted in an unreal atmosphere, with a host of symbols, weightless figures, and strong colours. The artist worked systematically as a stage set designer, mainly with Charles Dullin; here he transposed on to his sets the same surrealistic atmosphere which is encountered in his other works. Yorgos Vakalo discreetly served art, with great conscientiousness and a readiness to find renewal and to experiment, in a timely and pioneering way, as regards the development of art in Greece, in every form, from surrealism to abstraction.

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Υλικό
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
92X47
Source
Gift of Eleni G. Vakalo
Description
From 1958, Vakalo moved in the direction of abstraction, in conjunction with a private world which was fantastic and enchanting. This derived features from nature, as works in the series 'Tree Trunks', of the 1960s, testify. The titles which refer to trees, such as Trunk of a Poplar or Tree Bark, are pretexts for the artist to develop, sometimes by verticals and horizontals, sometimes by successive areas of colour, and at other times by concentric motifs, transparencies in the paint and fluidity in the composition, his own personal version of abstraction. It is to this series that his Tree Trunks, of 1963, corresponds.