“Leaving” at the age of 93, on Easter day, the artist Christos Karas took with him the spirit of the era when he grew into a man and flourished as an artist in Greece and abroad: songs dedicated to him by his compatriot Vasilis Tsitsanis from Trikali, the lessons of Giannis Moralis, his acquaintance with Melina Mercouris, his deep love for Cavafy or Angelos Sikelianos. The latter also had a very funny incident. As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karas, who admired and studied antiquity and especially the Golden Rule, spent some time in a student residence at Delphi in the early 1950s. One night he went to an archaeological site and read Sicilian alone in a cave in the ancient theater. The police officer who happened to see him arrested him, kept his ID, and then came into conflict with the law. Where to explain to a young man in a period of great suspicion and policing what he had to do at night to wander and recite.

Who was that

An artist who honored the Greek heritage, filling it with his personal quest as well as the collective spiritual concerns that dominated the fertile decade of the 60s, Karas was a rare case in the Greek visual scene. Born in 1930 in Trikala, he came from a legitimate family. He finished high school in Plaka, went to Panteio, but ended up studying at ASKT with Yannis Pappas and Yannis Moralis. In 1957, he left for Paris, where new horizons opened up before him and he came into contact with European artistic trends. From 1963 – the same year he was one of the founders of the Tomy group – and then, initially turning to abstraction, he returned to the human figure with neorealistic elements, to later mix magical realism with fantasy, images of reality and references to technology. In 1973, he became a member of the Ford Foundation of America, an experience that defined him, further enriching his work.

With the sculptor Georgiadis, he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale. In 2001 he was awarded by the Academy of Athens for all his work. In 2004, he created the monumental composition “Space Poetry” for the Halandrio station of the Athens Metro. His last exhibition took place in 2022.