“Vasso Katrakis. Experience and History”: The title of the retrospective exhibition of the great Greek engraver’s work, currently being held at the Art Gallery of Corfu, betrays how she perceived her duty to art.

“Vasso Katraki listens to the important issues of his time and incorporates them into his work. The hard work of ordinary people, motherhood, loneliness, human destiny are the topics on which he works obsessively,” notes art critic and curator of the exhibition Yannis Bolis. “She participates in the National Resistance, she survives the Civil War and the dictatorship of the colonels, she is persecuted for her beliefs, and she directs all this experience into the black ink prints of her works. He wants her involvement in history to be an issue.”

Simple operation

After the death of her father, the young Vasso leaves Aetolikos and moves to Athens to fulfill her cherished desire: to become an artist. “Secretly, I dreamed of becoming an artist, but it seemed so incomprehensibly big that it could not logically fit in my mind. Everything I saw, I said: I can do it. I didn’t know art was anything else.” She entered the School of Fine Arts in 1936. At first she attended the workshop of Humbertos Argyros and then Parthenis, but eventually she was won over by engraving, because by its nature it is a “simple” work. “Already with years of study, she shows the coarseness of her lines, avoiding the chatter of description,” says art history professor Dimitris Pavlopoulos.

The exhibition features more than 50 major works from the collection of her daughter Marianne Katraki, covering her entire journey through time, from the late 1930s, woodcuts from the 1940s and 1950s, to monumental pieces from the 80s.

“When my mother passed away, I listened and read people’s opinions about her, about her work and its importance. Little by little, the “daughter of Vassos Katraki”, apart from pride, gave me the feeling that I had not met, did not understand my mother as an artist the way I should,” the exhibition catalog says. .

He worked on sandstone with sculptor’s tools, mandrakes and kalems, so he sort of moved from painting to sculpture.

The emphasis on Corfu is mainly on the transition undertaken by Katraki in the mid-1950s from traditional techniques such as woodcuts to stone. “Wood was her alphabet. But when she wanted to move on to bigger forms and wider gestures, she looked for new materials that would suit her needs,” her daughter explains. abstraction,” adds Yannis Bolis. “Woodcutting was directly related to the illustration of forms, there was detail in it. He worked on sandstone with sculptor’s tools, mandrakes and chisels, so he kind of moved from painting to sculpture.”

Although her expression is stern and her long, primitive figures suggest Abstraction, she herself rejects it. “We must keep in mind that when Abstraction appears in Greece, it faces attacks from several fronts: from conservative academics, from the so-called generation of the 30s who spoke of anthropocentric art, and also from a significant part of the left . Wing artists believe that abstraction is a capitalist product, an example of a decadent Western way of expression, art that is not about a person and his problems. Vaso Katraki serves in the army, she strongly believes in people,” notes Yannis Bolis.

Partner and mother

Her participation and awards in the largest visual events of her time – the São Paulo Biennale, the Alexandria Biennale of the Mediterranean countries, where she won first prize in printmaking, the Venice Biennale in 1966, where she was awarded the Tamarind Prize for “large, most basic themes the life he illustrates” do not change his character in the least. “He was never talkative, spoke little and correctly. Her strength was in her work. She was giving, open, collected. We learned that artists are a bit idiosyncratic, we justify some extremes. It wasn’t like that at all, and there was a balance of things in that. She was excellent as a partner, tender as a mother, dedicated to her work, true to her values. She was a mother to everyone, a mother, how else to say it, ”concludes Marianne Katraki.

“Vasso Katrakis. Experience and History”, until 28 August, Municipal Gallery of Corfu.