Artist’s CV
Pavlos Dionysopoulos was born in 1930 in Filiatra. As a child, he began sketching his environment and the people who lived in it. After studying at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) from 1949 to 1953, he traveled to Paris on a state scholarship to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Thanks to this trip, he gained access to museums and galleries, and came into contact with other important hubs of contemporary art, which broadened his artistic horizons.
Returning to Athens, he worked in the fields of advertising and theater until 1958, when he returned to Paris, this time with a three-year scholarship from the Greek state. He settled in the City of Light, befriended Pierre Restany and the New Realists, with whom he exhibited his works in 1963. Dionysopoulos befriended Raymond Haynes and came into contact with figures such as Giacometti and Dubuffet. This new circle helped him recognize the artistic potential of cheap everyday materials, such as paper, brochures, posters and advertising leaflets. These became his main tools: he cut them into pieces and thin strips and dealt with the issue of mass communication through mass-produced products that promote mass consumption. The consumer goods advertised on his transformed surfaces eventually found a place in his work, such as shirts, ties and socks, depicted with spiral lines that form a kind of vortex.
The year 1966 marked a methodological transition for Dionysopoulos. Painting was now a thing of the past, and masses of folded paper were leading to new paths. His work focused on makeshift corsets, cans, and sandwiches encased in Plexiglas boxes, with increasingly daring combinations of materials and colors. He then moved from objects to entire environments, whose later approaches also offered the possibility of viewer participation.
This work provided new opportunities for Dionysopoulos in the field of contemporary art. It initially brought him to the United States, where he quickly made his mark after the exhibition of his work at the Fischbach Gallery in 1967. The following year, his first monumental visual installation was hosted by the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in Paris. A national solo exhibition was held in Athens in 1979, at the same time as the publication of Vogue magazine, while a first international retrospective exhibition was organized in 1972 by the Kunstverein in Hanover. Original works were presented for the occasion. The artist represented his country in 1980 at the Venice Biennale. In 1997, Greece participated in a traveling retrospective exhibition at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, which was also presented in Athens at the ASFA Factory. His work Footballers is permanently installed at the Omonia metro station in Athens.
Dionysopoulos passed away in 2019.
