Christoforou John

A child of Greeks from Smyrna. After losing his mother, he left London in 1930 and settled in Athens with his father, who died two years later. In 1935 he studied for a brief period at the Athens School of Fine Arts and in 1938 returned to England. From 1941 to 1946 he served in the RAF.

Since then he has been devoted to painting, studying at museums such as the National and Tate Gallery in London and in 1949 held his first solo exhibition at the Twenty Brook Street gallery. From 1951 to 1952 he resided in Paris, working in the city’s great museums and during the same period destroyed a large part of his previous work. Returning to London he continued his artistic and exhibition activity, remaining faithful to figurative painting. In 1955 he visited Spain and a year later settled in Paris where in 1960 he had a solo show at the Rive Gauche gallery, which he worked with until 1976. In 1962 he took part in the exhibition “New Figurative Painting” at the Mathias Fels gallery and in 1965 won the AICA prize in London. In 1990 he acquired French citizenship. He has presented his work in many group, solo and retrospective exhibitions (Randers, Denmark 1974, Saint-Etienne 1979, Montb²liard, Dunkerque, Saint-Qeuntin 1986).

One of the forerunners of “New Figurative Painting”, at the beginning of the Sixties, he created figurative, expressionistic painting, using vibrant color and strong, black outlines, in which the human figure and the drama of human existence dominate.