Sea Victory, 1954

Kostas Koulentianos was one of the most important representatives of abstraction in Greek sculpture. After completing his studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts, he left for Paris in 1945 as part of the first post-war group of scholarship artists funded by the French government. France then became his permanent place of residence until his death.

His meeting with Henri Laurens in 1947 was definitive for his artistic career and contributed even more to the rejection of the academic precepts he had been taught but which he had already begun to doubt. At the same time he abandoned the traditional materials, clay, plaster and bronze, and turned to lead and, later, iron. The influence of Laurens can be easily spotted in the works from the Fifties, in which Koulentianos was still working in a figurative framework, but with a strong abstractive tendency, his subjects still revolving around the human figure. In these works, such as the “Sea Victory”, curved organic forms are the rule, along with the movement and succession of empty and full spaces which reveal from early on the artist’s consistent speculations in regards with space, light and volume.