Untitled

Theodoros (Papadimitriou) was born in 1931 in Agrinio. He studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts under M. Tombros (1952-1957) and continued his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1959-62). On a Ford Foundation scholarship he taught at California State University in 1972. In 1980, he was elected Professor of Plastics at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens, where he taught until his retirement in 1998. His work was awarded the first prize for sculpture by the Athens House of Fine Arts and Letters in 1966 and the Grand Prix of the 42nd Salon d'Art Contemporaine in 1997. He abandoned figurative works very early on and then moved on to constructions, installations and actions. His works are based on the organization of plastic elements (spheres, folded shapes, etc.) and objects (wheels, pendulums, wire ropes, phallias, etc.) in order to express their creator's critical position towards the history of sculpture or to approach a dadaist, subversive iconography. His aim was to make the viewer a participant in the visual act by exploring the communicative character of art and by combining various media (speech, sound, photography, film, movement, stage presence) and materials (wood, glass, plexiglass, cloth, water, sand, etc.). At the same time he accompanied his theoretical pursuits with a number of theoretical texts and books: 'A sculptor in the market' (Athens 1981), 'Stigmata of course' (Athens 1984), 'Traces' (Athens 1988), 'A sculptor in the air' (Athens 1989), 'Ana-Katapsiya' (Athens 1992), 'Logoi' (Athens 1994). Since 1965, the year of his first solo exhibition, he has had more than thirty solo exhibitions, among which his retrospective at the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum in 1984 and at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki in 2009 stand out. At the same time, he participated in important group exhibitions and international events. His sculptural compositions adorn public and private spaces in Greece and abroad: at the Athens Stock Exchange (Meteoric Indices, 2007), at Syntagma Station in the Athens Metro (Metro Orology, 2001) and on the façade of the Hellenic Olympic Committee (Olympic Diptych, 1996). He died in Athens in 2018.