Sotiris Sorogas

Broken planks from journeys that never ended...

June 21, 2014 - July 30, 2014

Poros

Virvili Square
18020 Poros Island
Greece

(+30) 697 9989 684

Opening Hours
Mon-Sun:
11.00-13.00 &19.00-23.00

Born in Athens in 1936. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and graduated in 1961. In 1958 he received a scholarship from the National Royal Foundation to study post-Byzantine and folk art and for some years after his graduation from the ASFA he made a living as a painter of religious icons. In 1972, he had his first solo exhibition “Notes from Greece,” at the Athens - Hilton Art Gallery, which was dedicated to the poet George Seferis. The same year, he received the annual Ford Foundation Scholarship and spent a year studying contemporary art in New York, Chicago, London, Paris and Milan. He taught drawing and color at the Architecture School of the National Technical University until 2003. Today he is a professor emeritus. He was a founding member of the Group for Art Communication and Education and a member at the editorial board of the art theory journal, Speira. He has held many solo exhibitions in Greece, and has been represented at international events organized by the Ministry of Culture, the National Gallery, the Pierides Gallery and by private art galleries. In 2004 he was honored by the Athens Academy for his contributions to art. Six of his large compositions were placed at the Stathmos Larissis station of the Athens Metro in 2010. Studies, articles, reviews, and three monographs have been written about his work.

Since his student years, Sotiris Sorogas has been concerned with the idea of decay; ruins, rust, ruined fishing boats are the cherished permanent subject matter of his work, particularly over the last years.

The exhibition at Citronne Gallery focuses on his most recent work. The artist renders driftwood, wrecked boats, broken planks placed in the sand, or on rocks at boatyards - always near water. The palpable decay and deterioration of the materials symbolise time that passes and life that decays.

The scattered, useless, broken and worn fragments come out of their environment and are placed in the centre, on large canvases. They are presented emphatically, close up, as the result of meticulous observation and detailed rendering. The range of colours is limited: black, grey, rusty brown in contrast to the blinding white background. In addition, the traces of blue between the objects and the background suggest the presence of the sea. The photographic realism and characteristic spotless style of the canvas add to the image the feel of a document which intensifies with the literal descriptive nature of the title. These elements contrast with the poetic nature of the works and transform the represented objects into symbols. A moulded feeling of melancholy, a deep silence dominate as the monumental objects function as references to the passing of time - even to death. This dreamlike atmosphere gives them a metaphysical dimension.

Sorogas’ first exhibition in 1972 was dedicated to the poet Giorgos Seferis as his “poetry is spare, charged, and has a rare conceptual and expressive density... coexistence of grandeur and poverty, the eternal and the perishable, the timeless and the boundless, with the suffocatingly closed space of today...”.
Forty years later, Seferis comes back and marks this latest exhibition.