Nikos Kypraios

Nikos Kypraios was born in 1944 on the Greek island of Samos. He studied in Athens before emigrating to Australia in 1972 where he lived for many years until returning to Greece.

In a strong and stimulating fusion of two cultures, Kypraios echoes the passionate figurative painting of the great Australian school -- reflecting the strength and vitality of the Australian landscape and life -- while retaining the potency of his own mythology and emotional background.

Since the 1980s Kypraios turned more and more to the themes of still life and particularly to the category of anthography in which the accentualized colors and the expressionistic values have a determining role. In the 1990’s -- and returning to his island homeland -- he turned towards the thematic area of landscape as well as to a new vocabularly and stylistic direction. These works bring him closer not only towards a closer contact with natural space but also with Greek light, resulting in the development of new forms.

Permanent features of his painting technique are his division of the painting surface into two or more unities, a preference for curved lines, his love of subtle colors, and the combination of concrete and abstracted forms. In essence, Kypraios’ art gives us natural space bathed in light and objects appearing as functions of this light, achieving a poetic interpretation in which the universal and diachronic content of his themes are captured and expressed.

The fact that his compositions are generally enlivened by deeply personal and experienced emotions makes their attribution to current trends and “isms” difficult. An attempt to define his work as a passage through the expressionistic emphasis on the human figure leading towards a poetic, lyrical treatment of nature may be rather schematic. His relationship with expressionism is unmistakable but idiosyncratic, and does not preclude the simultaneous occurrence of surrealist or other features within an artistic idiom full of feeling and life.

Kypraios’ work is in the collections of the Marc Chagall Museum, Belarus, the National Gallery of Athens, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Museum of Modern Art in Minsk, among other institutions. In 1995 he won the First Prize at the Museum of Marc Chagall. He has had numerous one person exhibitions in Europe and Australia. The current show is his New York debut.