Five past three

Apostolos Georgiou was born in 1952 in Thessaloniki and grew up in a wealthy, artistic family - with a pianist father and mother. In 1971 he left to study architecture in Vienna, which he abandoned in 1973 to study painting at the Accademia di belle Arti in Florence (b. 1975). In 1980 he returned permanently to Greece and settled in Skopelos, where he has lived and worked ever since. His work, predominantly anthropocentric, is distinguished by the frequent repetition of ordinary and typical images, which creates iconographic stereotypes that eliminate their narrative character and function in a completely symbolic way. His first solo exhibition took place in 1973 at the ZM Gallery in Thessaloniki. Many followed in Athens and Thessaloniki, with the most important being the retrospective exhibition at the Port of Thessaloniki (1993) and the exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (2011). Furthermore, he participated in a series of group exhibitions including at the Ileana Tounta Centre for Contemporary Art in Athens (1988), at the House of Cyprus in Athens (organized by: DESTE Foundation, 1989), Wigmore Gallery, London (1997), Galerie Kienzle & Gmeiner, Berlin (1998), Hellenic American Union, Athens (2001), Kalambaka Contemporary Art Centre and Averoff Gallery, ("The Pioneers", Beltsiou Collection, 2002), at the DESTE Foundation, Athens ("Outlook", 2003, DESTE Prize), at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki ("Who is here?" 2007 & 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2007, "Topos", 2008), in the group exhibition Gazon Rouge in Athens (2004), etc.