Artist’s CV
Demosthenes Kokkinidis (October 12, 1929 – February 4, 2020) was a Greek painter, sculptor, professor and former dean (1979-1982) of the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASKT).
Kokkinidis was born in Drapetsona in 1929. The child of refugees from Asia Minor and Russia, he had a difficult childhood, as his father, who worked at the Piraeus Registry Office, was fired from his job during the dictatorship of I. Metaxas. for his socialist ideas. During the Occupation he was arrested by the Germans and accused of being a communist.
Kokkinidis left his studies at A.S.O.E.E. and moved to the ASKT of Athens, where he studied from 1952 to 1958, with professors Yannis Moralis and Spyros Papaloukas. He studied Byzantine and folk art and worked at the then newly founded Organization of Greek Handicrafts (1959-1961), as head of the artistic department. He continued his studies in Italy on the same subject and was particularly concerned with the exploitation of Greek folk crafts and ceramics. In 1972 he received a Ford Foundation fellowship.
During the 60’s he was involved (in parallel with painting) and with applied art, for purely livelihood reasons. Together with his wife, the equally important painter, Pepi Svoronou (1934-2011), he designed objects for the domestic and international market.
During his multi-year career, he presented his work in about thirty individual exhibitions in Greece and participated in Europalia (Belgium, 1982, in the section “Art and Dictatorship”) and in several group exhibitions.
He has also exhibited sculpture works, while in the past he was involved in clothing design and other artistic applications. However, his commitment to painting is what differentiates him from his peers of the “generation of the ’60s”, whose art was formed mainly outside of Greece.
Always acting as a social critic, Kokkinidis was a founding member of the “Art Group A” (1961-1967) and the “Group for Communication and Education in Art” (1976-1981).
In 1976, he was elected full-time professor at ASKT, where he served as rector and vice-rector (1979-1982) and taught until 1997.
He has published texts on art and, after 1974, has developed activities as a member of the boards of directors of several organizations (I.K.Y., D.I.K.A.T.S.A., National Theater, MIET, Company of Modern Greek Culture Studies). He was also President of the jury for the projects that adorn the Athenian Metro stations.
In 1989, his retrospective exhibition was organized by the Macedonian Center of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki.
In 2004 a book of his texts on art was published and in 2007 a monograph on his work was released.
His name was in the news in 2015, when Alexis Tsipras replaced the work of Theodoros Vryzakis, “Grateful Greece”, which until then adorned the prime minister’s office in the Maximos Palace, with the work of Kokkinidis, “Antithesis”.
Kokkinidis died in 2020, at the General Hospital “G. Gennimatas” in Athens, at the age of 91.
In his first solo exhibitions (1961, “Klio”, Hydra and 1964, “Merlin”, Athens) he presented a painting with several abstract elements and themes inspired by life in the popular districts and the islands. Soon after, he turned to a more clearly politicized subject matter, which reflected the charged climate of the time. The works of this period, some of which were exhibited much later, do not feature realistic writing, but rather violent color intensities and strongly expressionistic elements.
His work, from the 1980s onwards, ceases to have direct references to politics and Kokkinides’ painting focuses on personal experiences, with themes of nature and human communication. Later it expands to the investigation of the timeless elements that connect the present with the mythical past, with works inspired mainly by the Homeric Odyssey.
