Lavdas Apostolos

Artist Biography O APOSTOLOS LAVDAS (1940 – ) was born in Piraeus in 1940. He studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1962-1965) in Brussels, and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1965-1966) in Paris. His work consists mainly of human figures, which he renders in an expressionistic mood. He uses a rich colour scale, which he handles with immediacy and spontaneity. He works in thematic units and has a particular preference for dynamic subjects that include the human figure in motion (compositions with athletes, runners, horsemen, etc.). He creates superimposed colour layers with sharp and broad brushstrokes, giving them a specific direction and colour flow. He avoids the design contour and leads the viewer’s eye to read the subject through the colour correlations. Movement and time are intertwined in the works of Apostolos Lavdas. The painter seems to capture moments in time which he highlights with his inspiration, giving them a leading role. “The themes of jockeys and runners have been occupying my mind for thirty years” says Apostolos Lavdas himself. “When I lived in Paris, I used to look out of my window and see a racecourse where the riders would start and finish their course. This vital image, repeated daily, was impressed on my memory and has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me ever since.” Apostolos Lavdas presented his first jockeys in Antwerp in 1965, at an exhibition organised by the city’s Cultural Centre, where he was awarded first prize. Twelve years later in 1977 at the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Florence, he also won the first prize. A new creative period marks the pictorial evolution of Apostolos Lavdas. It is the time when the artist releases his work from the dependencies of the past. His return to Greece becomes dynamic from 1978 with solo exhibitions that mark his career. In 1985, the jockeys of Apostolos Lavdas caused a special sensation in a solo exhibition held with the collaboration of Alexandros Iolas, the international art maecenas who supported Lavdas’ painting especially in the 1980s and until his death. Lavda’s works subsequently took much more interesting forms, revealing a new world of balances, more malleable in construction, more extreme in visual terms and open to a variety of refreshing transformations. But however much we try to decipher the painting of Apostolos Lavdas, the painter himself has taken care to let the viewer unravel the thread of his personal thought. He sticks to the position that he is a “street artist”, a painter in the traditional sense of the term, a “romantic curse” who has escaped the changing fashions of the system and still enjoys the pleasure of pure painting. Solo exhibitions “Astor” 1965, 1976, 1978. Goethe Institute, Thessaloniki 1967, 1976, 1978 Goethe Institute, Thessaloniki 1967, 1976. “Brachot, Brussels, 1970. “Panselnos” Thessaloniki 1982, 1984, 1986. “Skoufa” 1985, 1988. “Opus 39” Nicosia 1989. “Expression”, 1990. “Moiaraki” 1992 Panhellenic Games 1971, 1973, 1975. “Zygos” 1978. “The Third Eye” 1979. “Dracos” 1987. “House of Cyprus” 198