Sklavos Yerassimos

He studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1950-1956) with professor Michalis Tombros and continued in Paris, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, with sculptors Henri-Geprges Adam, Marcel Gimond and Hubert Yencesse, and at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere with Ossip Zadkine (1957-1960). He associated with Christian and Yvonne Zervos as well as the collector Baroness Alix de Rothschild, who in 1962 granted him a workshop at Levallois-Perret.

His first solo exhibition took place in 1961 at Yvonne Zervos’s gallery “Cahiers d’Art,” followed by many solo shows during his lifetime and posthumously. He also participated in major group exhibitions, including Panhellenic exhibitions, Paris Salons, the Antwerp Biennale of Sculpture (1961) and the Sao Paulo Biennale of the same year, the Paris Biennale Internationale des Jeunes Artistes in 1961 and 1963, in which he won first place in sculpture as well as receiving the young artists award, “Seven Trends in Contemporary Sculpture” (Sept Tendances de la Sculpture Contemporaine) in the gallery “Cahiers d’Art”, Paris (1963) and the international modern sculpture exhibition “Exposition Internationale de Sculpture Contemporaine” at the Rodin Museum (1966). His work has also been posthumously presented in major group exhibitions.

After a short period in the service of a figurative approach, during which he was interested in psychological profiling as well as an abstract treatment of the human figure, in 1959 Yerassimos Sklavos adopted abstraction. Mainly working on hard materials – granite, quartzite, marble, porphyry – and less often in iron or wood, which he carved directly – he created works in the round, in the context mainly of geometric and in certain cases organic abstraction. In 1960, he invented “Telesculpture”, a patented technique that enabled him to carve his materials more easily, using an oxyacetylene flame. The light plays a fundamental role in the effectiveness of his work, as it reveals recesses and apertures, and highlights the volumes, surfaces, the nature and colour of his material. Besides sculpture, he also became involved with drawing and painting, creating works which echo the style of his sculpture and range from figuration to abstraction.