Costas Tsoclis was born in Athens in 1930. In the Greek capital, he lived under the threat of the Second World War, the German occupation and the Greek civil war. Nevertheless, he pursued his artistic curiosity working as an assistant at the workshop of Stephanos Almaliotis from ages 12 to 18, as well as assisting at the workshop of Vangelis Faenos in the creation of monumental movie posters and set design elements. In 1948, aged 18, he enrolled at the Athens School of Fine Arts where he studied under Yannis Moralis until 1954. Three years later, he obtained a Greek state scholarship and travelled to Rome, where he studied fresco and encaustic art at the Scuola delle Arti Ornamentali. Alongside fellow artists Vlassis Caniaris, Nikos Kessanlis, Dimitris Condos and Yiannis Gaitis, he created the Gruppo Sigma. Based in Rome, the group’s main purpose was to solidify a support system for expatriated Greek artists.
During this period, under the influence of local artist Afro Basadella and Alberto Burri, Tsoclis developed an initial vernacular characterised by a gestural abstraction realised through the use of industrial and/or low-cost materials such as cement, charcoal and hay, in a bid to highlight his art’s inherent plasticity and texture.
In 1960, Tsoclis left Rome for another European capital: Paris. In this city, where he would stay on and off for over twenty years, his artistic language evolved. In 1966, his first ‘objects’, which incorporate a degree of trompe l’oeil, were introduced into his work. In 1971, he left for Berlin, where he lived, worked and exhibited for 18 months thanks to a DAAD scholarship. Throughout this decade, he celebrated found everyday objects (such as crumpled paper between 1970 and 1975), while progressively introducing new staple subjects such as trees and seascapes in 1978. In these works, depicted elements exist alongside physical elements affixed to the canvas.
Tsoclic travelled back and forth between Athens and Paris from 1973, definitively returning to Greece in 1985, where he began experimenting with video. Back in his native country, he focused his energy on his local reputation and visibility, at the cost of his international reputation.
The artist’s perspective on his own art, despite some sombre themes and dark tones, is one of elevation. ‘Art is not intended to make human beings more unhappy, but to save them,’ he explains. ‘Happiness is made up of moments in time when you felt rewarded with your own choices’. His paintings are known to transform the real into the imaginary and the invisible into the visible, challenging visual restrictions. His technique of ‘living painting’ gave way to a whole movement in 1985, expanding the limits of painting beyond the borders of canvas.
Tsoclis has exhibited his work in many solo and group exhibitions internationally, including at the Paris Biennale of Young Artists (1965), the Sao Paulo Biennale (1965), the Venice Biennale (1986), Costas Tsoclis- Retrospective, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2001). In 2011, the Costas Tsoclis Museum was founded on Tinos, in the Kampos region.
