Untitled 65/118

Omiros Georgiadis was born in 1912 in Sokia in Asia Minor and with the Asia Minor catastrophe his family moved to Samos. In 1924 he was sent to Piraeus, where he attended classes at the French School Saint Paul and came into contact with French thought. In the following years he was involved in the tobacco trade and travelled especially in Northern Greece, where in 1945 he settled in Drama, an important centre of the tobacco trade. From 1949 until his death in 1976 he lived in Thessaloniki. In his early works he was mainly interested in visual reality, expressed through depictions of natural space, with elements of figurativeness, while from the 1960s he turned to abstraction and developed a personal artistic idiom, characterized by expressionist influences, sometimes emphasizing geometric vocabulary and color values, sometimes emphasizing biomorphic elements and low color tones. During the 1970s he turns to spectral architectural themes, in which dark tones and a heavy pessimism predominate. Alongside painting, he also became involved in sculpture and after 1972 decided to work more systematically in clay and bronze.