ALEKOS FASSIANOS

Alekos Fassianos (25 October 1935 – 16 January 2022) was born in Athens. His father was a musician and his mother taught ancient Greek. He studied violin at the National Conservatory and painting under Yannis Moralis at the School of Fine Arts in Athens from 1956 to 1960. In 1960, he received a scholarship from the French government and went to Paris to study lithography at the École des Beaux-Arts. After completing his studies in Paris in 1963, Fassianos returned to Athens. Together with architect Antonis Kepetzis and artists Vasilis Sperantzas and Nikos Stefanou, they moved into an old house in Kallithea, which was granted
to them by the National Gallery of Athens. The so called “studio of Kallithea” was a vibrant workshop that shaped and pushed boundaries of the Athenian art scene and where artists and poets gathered. It was also there that Fassianos painted his first ‘smoking cyclist’. At the iconic Athenian café Brazilian where intellectuals gathered, he befriended poets such as Odysseas Elytis,
Miltos Sachtouris and Andreas Embirikos, with the encouragement of whom he created a series of ‘cyclists with windblown hair’.
In 1967, with the rise of the dictatorship of the Colonels in Greece, Fassianos moved permanently to Paris. Two years later, he was discovered by legendary art dealer Paul Facchetti. They began a vibrant collaboration, with Facchetti exhibiting Fassianos’ works alongside those of fellow Parisian artists Jean Paul Riopelle and Georges Mathieu. For Fassianos, the solo shows organized byFacchetti were critical to furthering his career as they marked the first com-prehensive showcase of his artistic idiom. In the 70s, he was represented by Alexander Iolas Gallery, showing alongside Max Ernst, René Magritte, Giorgiode Chirico and Martial Raysse. Fassianos’ works travelled from Malmö to Tokyo through Zurich, Berlin, Milan, and New York and in 1983, Blaise Gautier organized a monograp presentation of the artist’s work at Centre Pompidou as part of the periodical ‘Revue parlée’. In 1985, the Château de Chenonceau presented his first retro- spective, followed by a series of gallery exhibitions around the world. In the late 1980s, the artist expressed his desire to remodel a building his family owned in the old center of Athens with the vision to house the Alekos Fassianos Museum. Together with architect and longtime friend, Kyriakos Krokos they altered, renovated it and the project was completed in 1995. The building is of significant importance to the contemporary architectural map of Athens for its
mastery in corrective intervention to an existing building and its intensive and precise crafting of surfaces. Aside from painting, Fassianos was a writer, poet, ceramist, designer, scenographer, and architect. He created the costumes and stage sets for
numerous plays including Franz Kafka’s America and Euripides’ Helen at the National Theatre of Athens and, in 1980 he oversaw the scenography of No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. Throughout his career, Fassianos illustrated numerous editions for writers and poets such as Miltos Sachtouris, Odysseas Elytis, Constantin Cavafy, Yiannis Ritsos, Kostas Tachtsis, Louis Aragon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Lacarrière, Paul Valéry, Fernando Arrabal and Jean-Marie Drot, among others. He created limited edition publications with Bruno Roy, editor of Fata Morgana, and the publisher André Biren. Fassianos created design objects such as furniture, lights, door handles and homeware for his residences in Athens and Kea. During his lifetime, Fassianos was awarded Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Arts, Officier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterand, and, in 2021, he received the highest award of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture in France, Madame Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin.