Galery

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May be here will not land the extremely precious paintings with signature of the artist who carried into new directions the art of the 20^th century, however in Athens are coming linoleum carvings of his. The art lovers could admire them in the enigmatic gallery “Gagozyan”, located on the ground floor of an apartment building on Merlyn street. The gallery is only opening after a previous appointment.  

The story of the artworks that we are going to see in Athens is: Picasso never stopped experimenting with various techniques of engraving tells “Tea Nea” newspaper. Some of them include lithography, engraving on metal and monotype. At the end of the 50s of the past century, however, he spent long period of time in Southern France. Due to the great distance to Paris it was very hard for him to communicate with his associate printers who were located in the French capital. This only became grounds for more experiments.

So Picasso started to engrave on linoleum, by carving a sketch on the surface of the linoleum with a knife, scalpel or burin. His first engraving of this type is “Toros en Vallauris” (1954), which is a simple black and white print, however since 1959 it is obvious that he has already mastered his work with this technique. This, however, bored him quickly, as this traditional method took a long time to finish and he decided to simplify it be using the same linoleum surface for each color. Using this new technique Picasso manages to create over 100 engravings in thee years.

The topics he portrays were inspired by his muse and wife Jaclyn Rock, portraits of great artists of the past as well as a series of engravings honoring El Greco. He preserves the initial composition of the self portrait of El Greco, however he underlines in a different way the features of the face and the clothes in order to make clear his intervention of the work.

Interesting

Picasso is the family name of the artist’s mother.

His father also was an artist. Picasso enrolled in a fine arts school at the age of 13, while the other students of the school were at the age of 20.

Picasso dies at the age of 92 and leaves behind 1 900 paintings, 3 200 ceramic articles, 7 000 sketches, 1 200 sculptures, 30 00 engravings.

Together with Georges Braque they set the beginning of the cubism, which is the first “-ism” in the modern art.

ΙΝFΟ

Art gallery “Gagozyan” (3 Merilyn street) starting January 8th until April 10^th

Information line: 210 36 40 215