The painter Alekos Fassianos died on Sunday January 16 at the age of 86. This artist, with a multidisciplinary approach, was preparing a major exhibition in Paris next March at the Dimitris Sabatakakis gallery.
Alekos Fassianos’ entire career has been spent between Greece and France. Born in Athens in 1935, he trained at the city’s School of Fine Arts with Yiannis Móralis, one of the masters of Greek modernism, praising the strength of Greece and breaking with classical tradition. Fassianos left Greece in 1960 and moved to Paris, where he studied lithography at the Beaux-Arts and met Matisse, Picasso and Louis Aragon. This one is interested in his work and writes regarding him. Like his master Móralis, Fassianos willingly moved from painting, sculpture and drawing to scenography. He makes sets for plays and has fun with his little shadow theater which he presents to the Centre Pompidou in 1983.
Bibliophile and illustrator
If Fassianos is present in the biggest international biennials, from Venice to São Paulo, he also exhibits in galleries such as the Paul Facchetti gallery and that of Alexandre Iolas in the years 1960-1970, then at the Artcurial gallery and that of of the Nahons in the 1980s and 90s. More recently, Pierre-Alain Challier showed his engravings, Opéra Gallery made him a personal exhibition, which circulated in its various spaces from Geneva to Dubai.
Dimitris Sabatakakis’ gallery is currently preparing an exhibition in Paris for the end of March. A lover of books, Fassianos illustrates numerous works with Adam Biro and Fata Morgana. In return, many authors, from Marguerite Yourcenar to Yves Navarre, from Jean-Marie Drot to Bernard Gheerbrant, enjoyed talking regarding his classic, cultured and colorful work. ” All the work of Fassianos, the colors that fill his canvases, the multidimensional shapes that dominate his paintings, breathe Greece “, underlined the Greek Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni. Since 2019, Fassianos had stopped painting while imagining a museum in his name in Athens thanks to the help of his wife Mariza Fassianos, his daughter who chairs the company Fassianos Estates, and his architect friend Kyriakos Krokos.
The spirit of Olympic champion d’Alekos Fassianos (2001) ©️Hellenic Olympic Committee / Wikimedia
