ARTISTIC EVOLUTION
Dimitri Perdikidis was born in Piraeus, Greece, 1922.
He spent his childhood and youth in Greece starting to paint from a very early age. Studies in the School of Fine Arts of Athens (1950 - 53) where he receives an academic education. Gets a Spanish Government scholarship to study at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. Attracted by the strength and mastery of the Spanish painters Goya, Velázquez, Solana, etc, he goes to Spain in 1953 and leaves Greece which has been devastated by the German occupation and the subsequent civil war. These situations were to mark him throughout his life.
Matches the majority of Spanish painters who were to participate intensively in the later decades in Spain´s aesthetic renewal process at the School of Fine arts of San Fernando (informalism in Madrid with Saura, Millares etc.. and the sensitivity that flowed from Barcelona as a result of the activities of the artistic group Dau al Set (Tàpies, Cuixart, etc.).
Lives for some time in Cuenca where he makes his first exhibition in 1954. After a relatively naturalistic short stage with magical, surrealistic and expressionistic infiltrations, he cultivates a kind of neo-figurative style with magmas of form in wich vigorous idealized human figures would emerge through large strokes. Ever since his first exhibitions, he receives warm support from the Spanish press who were giving attention to the artistic transformations of his time.
His first individual exhibitions are held in Madrid: exhibiting hall of the General Directorate of Fine arts (1957), Bucholz Gallery(1958), Sala Neblí (1960), and in London, in the Woodstock Gallery (1960). Wins the National Award of Engraving in 1958 (Madrid).
As of 1960 and onwards,he renounces to any type of objective pretexts and turns to strong and passionate abstraction. Works with freedom and progressive mastery full of poetical subtelties,archaic evocations, as if these arose from a greek collective unconscious. He creates works of great beauty in which he integrates signs and symbols of classical and ancient Greece. He participates in the Spanish Pavilion of the VI Bienal de São Paulo, 1960. He presents his work in 1961 in the Ateneo de Madrid, where he receives the National Press Award alongside Barjola. International exhibitions: he receives the International Award (silver medal) of Abstract painting at Lausanne (Switzerland). Presents his work in Berlin, London and in the International Artfair of New York in 1962 (Spanish Pavillion). Much of his work from this period is found in collections and museums in the United States. He maintains his links with Greece doing an exhibition in the Athens Hilton in 1963. In 1964 he participates in the Spanish Pavilion of the XXXII Venice Biennale and the Juana Mordó Gallery in 1965.
Being a restless and unsatisfied explorer, he initiates a process of transition from abstraction that culminates with the presentation of the exhibition in the General Direction of Fine Arts in Madrid (1966) where he amalgamates previous experiences in his work with matter, with the introduction of symbolical figures charged with mythical connotations (with names like Torso, Centaur, Paris and Helen). Here occurs an exploration of Pathos, a tragic sense of existence, violence in subtle harmony, in such a way that it produces an intense shock in the Viewer.
In 1966, he also participates in the Spanish Pavillion of the Venice Biennale XXXIII.
Apparently instinctive but refined painter, he also begins to introduce collage, figures, and human faces, integrating them with a mastery that surprises: cold paintings, full of passion in which the evocation of mythical and expresionistic and existential reflections remain. He presents this last work in the Ateneo de Madrid (1967), Rath Museum, Geneva (1967), Brussels (1968), where he has works at the Museum of Fine Arts as well as in Ixelles. He also exhibits his work in Los Angeles, California (1969).
In 1970 he initiates a cooling period in his painting, related to the social and political reality of the moment. He starts working with airbrush and reproductions of photographs, showing a combination of constructivism as a background, and narrative figuration as foreground. He makes use of photography and the ubiquitous images in media rescuing human suffering, pain, and anguish. His paintings have an increasingly intense social content in which there is contained anger. He presents his work in Cyprus in 1970, at the Seiquer Gallery in Madrid (1971 and 1973), in the Nova Gallery, Barcelona (1973), in the Technos Gallery, Athens (1974) and the Desmos Gallery, Athens (1975 and 1977). He participates in the collective exhibition "Panorama 78" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid in 1978.
During this time, given his deep friendship with the poet Yanis Ritsos,he creates a series of 10 prints to illustrate the book of poetry titled "ROMIOSINI". The text of the poem is later translated into Spanish by his wife, Elena Perdikidis, and is published alongside the prints with VISOR Publishing Company, Madrid.
Coinciding with the Spanish transition and social transformations of the time, he makes a transition towards an abstraction rich in subtelty, and presents this new phase in an exhibition in Ynguanzo Gallery, Madrid, 1980. He produces works where there is a fusion of many structural and formal elements that had defined his previous to realism exhibiting work.There is an affinity towards constructivism and he incorporates mature and minimal elements of previous experiences in the field of abstraction. He explores the multidimensional posibilities of painting with and on wood. Some of these paintings are unfortunately unfinished due to his sudden death in the end of this decade. Although he was deeply attached to Spain, he decided to spend his last years in Greece and return to the land that saw him to be born after the death of his wife. He made his last exhibitions in different galleries in Athens (1985-1989). He died in Athens in December 1989 and always remembered his Spanish vital and profesional experience which spanned most of his existence . One of his works was included in the collective exhibition "Madrid and the 60s" which took place in the Comunity of Madrid Exhibiting Hall.