The Book of Life, Chapter C: the three KKK

Constantin Xenakis was born in 1931 in Cairo, where he began his studies in drawing. In 1955 he moved to Paris, where he studied architecture and decoration at the École Supérieure des Arts Modernes (1956-57) and painting at the Academiè de la Grande Chaumière (1957-61). In 1970, on a DAAD scholarship, he moved to Berlin and taught at the Schiller College (1971-1973) and the Hochschulle für Bildende Künste . In the years that followed he worked between France and Germany, travelling and exhibiting almost all over the world. His early works were in the vein of abstract expressionism and amorphous art and are distinguished by the intensity of gesture, rhythm and movement, dynamism and plasticity of colour. In the mid-1960s or so, he joined the photomovement art, actions and environments with the main aim of forcing the art viewer to be more than a passive receiver and to become an active and participant in the artistic act. During the 1970s he moved to the language of signs, he incorporated elements of everyday life into his works, used formulas from the vast cultural tradition both Greek and Egyptian and created a new visual alphabet, a new script. In the development of his work he acted as a timeless scribe of Ancient Egypt and attempted to transcribe modern reality with hieroglyphic codes. Since the 1990s he began to visit Greece frequently and divided his time between Paris and Athens, exhibiting his autobiographical series entitled The Book of Life and presenting a retrospective exhibition of his works of the last 20 years at the K.M.S.T. in 2003. He died in 2020 in Athens.