Bust of Anastasios Mich. Averoff

Mitsos Katsikoyannis received lessons in design and sculpture from A... Sochos, on the prompting of Anastasios Averoff, who was his benefactor, and then, in the period 1934 - 1939, studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Costas Dimitriadis and Michalis Tombros, while, when he had finished his training, he studied ancient sculpture in the Delphi Museum.
Because of his membership of the Communist Party and of the National Liberation Front (EAM), he was sentenced in 1949 to 13 years in prison. During this long period, the only intellectual escape for Katsikoyannis was his employment in art. With single-mindedness and with great speed he designed and produced plaster models, some of which he managed to smuggle to Athens. In spite of the fact that he often insisted on a specific theme, each of his creations conceals a wealth of variations and new implications, but a strongly anti-authoritarian character, as a consequence of his experiences as a political prisoner, is always to the forefront. His classical education is reflected in these works, which are mainly representational, a typical feature being the supremacy of design, even in the reliefs. The artist achieves this by engraving deeply the features which he wishes to stress, while leaving other portions of the surface untouched. In the busts in particular, Katsikoyannis's technique results in a marked dramatisation of expression.