KunstenaarGreek
Alexandre Fassianos
1 actieve items
Born in Athens on 13 December 1935, Alekos Fassianos grew up in a household shaped by music and ancient history - his father was a composer and teacher, his mother a teacher of ancient Greek. He began painting in 1945, during the combined trauma of World War II and the Greek Civil War, and enrolled at the Athens School of Fine Arts where he studied under Yannis Moralis. In 1960, a French government scholarship brought him to Paris to study lithography at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. He would spend much of the following 35 years there, absorbing the city while building a visual language that looked not to the Parisian avant-garde but inward, toward Greece.
Fassianos developed a figurative style that is immediately recognizable: flattened forms rendered in profile, bold outlines, and color applied in flat, even fields of blue, ochre, terracotta, and gold. His figures - cyclists, smokers, lovers, mythological characters - move through pictorial space with the assurance of ancient vase painting and the freshness of mid-century street life. The influence of Byzantine iconography and Greek folk art, particularly the naive painter Theophilos, sits beneath the surface without ever becoming imitative. The result is an art that is simultaneously archaic and contemporary, personal and universally readable.
International recognition came steadily. His work was included in the 1971 Sao Paulo Bienal, and the following year he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale. His prints and paintings entered important collections including the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, and the Centre for Contemporary Art. In 2004, the National Gallery of Athens held a major retrospective of his career. A dedicated museum bearing his name, housed in a building he co-designed with architect Kyriakos Krokos, opened to the public in Athens in 2023, a year after his death on 16 January 2022.
Fassianos worked extensively in printmaking alongside painting, producing lithographs and etchings that reached collectors across Europe. His prints circulated particularly well in Nordic auction markets, where their graphic clarity and distinctive Mediterranean sensibility found a receptive audience. On Auctionist, 25 works by Fassianos have appeared, predominantly prints and etchings offered through Swedish regional auction houses. The top recorded sale is a signed lithograph titled "Hector et Andromaque" which achieved 28,500 SEK at Garpenhus Auktioner. Other notable results include a color etching titled "Le Retour" at 12,600 SEK and "L'observateur de la mer" at 11,900 SEK. His works appear most often through Garpenhus Auktioner, Crafoord Auktioner Malmo, and Bukowskis.