Pavlos Dionyssopoulos was born in Filiatra in 1930. As a child, he started to sketch his surroundings and the people who populated them. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens (AFSA) from 1949 to 1953, he travelled to Paris on a state scholarship to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. The trip provided access to museums, galleries and proximity with other important hubs of contemporary art, which broadened his artistic horizons.
Back in Athens, he worked in advertising and theatre before travelling back to Paris in 1958, this time on a 3-year Greek state scholarship. Settling in the City of Lights, he befriended Pierre Restany and the New Realists, alongside whom he exhibited work with the New Realists during their Salon in 1963. Dionyssopoulos befriended Raymond Haynes and encountered the likes of Giacometti and Dubuffet. This new circle helped him recognise the artistic potential of cheap everyday materials, such as paper, flyers, posters and advertising leaflets. These become his main tools and he cut them into shreds and fine strips, exploring the theme of mass communication via mass-produced products promoting mass consumption. The consumer goods advertised on his transformed surfaces eventually found their way into his work, for example, shirts, ties and socks depicted with spiralling lines, as if a vortex of sorts.
The year 1966 marked a methodological transition for Dionyssopoulos. Painting was now in the rear-view mirror and folded paper volumes were leading the way forward. His work focused on makeshift corsets, cans and sandwiches encased in plexiglass boxes, with increasingly daring combinations of material and colour. He then moved from objects to entire environments, later iterations of which even offered the chance for spectator participation.
This corpus opened up opportunities for Dionyssopoulos in the contemporary art scene. It first took him to the USA, where he rapidly made his mark, showing work at the Fischbach Gallery in 1967. The following year, his first monumental installation found a home at the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in Paris. A national solo exhibition was held in Athens in 1979 at the same time as a spread in Vogue magazine, while a first international retrospective was organised as early as 1972 by the Kunstverein in Hannover. Original participative works were displayed for the occasion. The artist represented his country at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Greece enjoyed a touring retrospective in 1997 in Thessaloniki at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, and this was also presented in Athens at the ASFA Factory. His artwork, Football players, can be found permanently installed in the Omonia station of the Athens metro.
Dionyssopoulos passed away in 2019.
