Vlassis Caniaris was born in Athens in 1928. The seminal Greek figure studied fine arts as a secondary activity alongside his medical training from 1946 to1950, but his passion and talent led him to drop out and pursue art full time, enrolling in Athens’ Academy of Fine Arts. At odds with his national government, especially during the junta period, Caniaris was happy to explore the riches of the continent, furthering his education in Rome, Paris and Berlin. Greek and international politics nonetheless remained at the core of his work, as did the tragic figure of the immigrant. Indeed, having witnessed – as an immigrant himself in various European cities – the need for an imported workforce following the Second World War and the subsequent rejection of immigrant labour in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis.
As an artist, Caniaris strove to denounce political injustice and portray the fragility of the immigrant condition. From the 1970s onwards, national identity, social inequality and population movement became the main focuses of his practice. Tourist (1974) shows a papier-maché figure relieving itself against a wall covered in graffiti, with slogans and symbols reminiscent of an occupied Athens during the Nazi regime. The title and political reality invoked explore the concept of passage, otherness and displacement in contrasting ways that highlight the abuses of industrialised societies. Caniaris often equates his figures to witnesses and blurs the delimitation between action and inaction in moments of tragedy and crisis. The suitcase, a symbol of forced or necessary precarious life changes, naturally became a recurring subject in his multifaceted corpus.
The artist’s own experiences as an ‘immigrant’ informed and influenced his practice, one journey at a time. When in Rome from 1956 to 1960, Caniaris focused on two-dimensional art, producing flatter images inspired by the works of Giorgio de Chirico and symbolic realism. A short return to Greece between the years of 1967 and 1969 saw him reinvest public space to claim opposition against the military regime, as seen in his evocative piece, Trap (1969), before he was forced to leave his native country again. When in Paris between 1960 and1967, and 1969 and1973, material dissolution brought his corpus back into real space, using everyday objects which often bled or leaked onto/into his artworks. During his time in Berlin from 1973 to 1975, he took a greater interest in sculpture and coupled it with scientific data and statistics to explore the link between globalisation and the refugee reality. This research greatly informed Caniaris’ Immigrant series from 1971 to 1976.
Notable exhibitions include; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1970); the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1972); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1976), Atopolis, Mons (2015); the Gwangju Biennale (2014); the Venice Biennale (2013, 2003, 1988, 1964); the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2012); the Thessaloniki Biennale (2011); the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, Germany (2013) and the Benaki Museum, Athens (2009).
Caniaris passed away in 2011 in Athens.
