Christos Karas was born in Trikala in 1930. Following an aborted stint at the Panteion University from 1948 to1950, Karas enrolled at the Athens School of Fine Arts where he studied, like many of his peers, under Yannis Moralis and Yannis Pappas from 1951 to1955. Thanks to a state scholarship service, he travelled to Paris where he studied fresco at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts from 1957 to1960. While in the City of Lights, he travelled to the neighbouring countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Great Britain, taking in their respective contemporary art practices.
It is nonetheless in Athens that he enjoyed his first solo exhibition, in the Zygos Gallery in 1961. Two years later, Paris welcomed his work at the Paris Biennale of 1963. At that time, his efforts were largely dedicated to the revitalisation of Greek painting, leading to the foundation of the Section Group in 1976and the League of Artists.
He also was an important presence in international group exhibitions, such as the 3rd Youth Biennale of Paris (1963), the 7th Alexandria Biennale (1965), the Sao Paolo Biennale (1967), the Venice Biennale (1984), the 4th Biennale of European Engraving, Baden-Baden (1985). He had other important shows at the Biennale de Paris and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. Karas has exhibited with Alekos Fassianos and Achilleas Christides and his art features in five museum collections, including the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki and the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre.
Ten years after his stay in France, a new grant from the Ford Foundation took him to New York, where he worked from 1973 to1975, before travelling across the United States and Canada.
Artistically, his early collages led to figurative works of an expressionistic and surrealistic character and later compositions where the elements of objective reality are rendered in a poetic way. This was a natural development of earlier stages of his work, and he placed special weight on the role of drawing.
The island of Hydra, which he started visiting in 1948 when he was still a student, holds an important place in Karas’ practice, becoming a yearly holiday destination from the 1950s onwards. In acknowledgement of this inspirational bond between the artist, his work and the island, a retrospective of his work was organised at the Historic Archive Museum of Hydra. The event coincided with the establishment of the Christos Karas – Hydra Foundation, which aims to preserve and exhibit the works of the artist himself and other artists.
