Alekos Fassianos

Characterized by their Hellenic motifs, Alekos Fassianos’s paintings and prints served as symbols of Greek national identity in the years following World War II. Fassianos has widely exhibited in Greece and in major cities around the world. His work was included in the 1971 São Paulo Bienal, and he represented Greece at the 1972 Venice Biennale. Fassianos studied under Yiannis Moralis at the Athens School of Fine Arts and he received a scholarship from the French government in 1960 to continue his studies of lithography at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Rather than emulating the European avant-garde, he looked to his Greek heritage as a source of artistic inspiration; his graphic, figurative style was inspired by ancient Greek vase painting as well as Byzantine and folk art traditions. Fassianos’s flattened, faux-naïf figures—often depicted in profile—are at once contemporary and archetypal, portraying mythic characters in a Mediterranean palette of blue, ochre, and terracotta.