Giorgos CHatzimichalis

Giorgos Chatzimichalis was born in 1954 in Athens. He received his first painting lessons from Andreas Georgiadis the Cretan. After the death of his father, Leonidas Chatzimichalis, he was greatly influenced by Goya's Black Period, Soutine, Bacon, and Munch. In 1970, he met architect Aris Konstantinidis and Natalia Mela, a pivotal acquaintance that opened new horizons for him, introducing him to Picasso and Matisse. In 1971, he began studying in London at the Hammersmith School of Art, then at City and Guilds, and primarily at Saint Martin's School of Art, where he completed his studies in 1975. He was influenced by Greek surrealism, particularly by Andreas Embirikos, and became acquainted with pop art, marking the first shift in his artistic journey from photorealism to a form of representational autobiographical documentation. His first solo exhibition featuring works of this trend took place at the "Hora" Gallery in 1977. In 1978, he returned to Athens, where he remained and worked until 1985. In 1979, he began collaborating with the newly established "Agra" publications, for which he designed many covers. His second solo exhibition was at "Hora" in 1981, and his third at Gallery "3" in 1984-85. From 1985, for the next six years, he divided his time between a studio in Paris, where he settled, and Aegina. The artistic perspective he developed there is more clearly reflected in the work Officinae Pictorum / circa 1221: an obsession with engaging with what Western tradition—including, emphatically, Byzantine—defines as an image and the relationship between image and text. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. In 1990, he worked with archaeologist Charalambos Bakirtzis on the excavation at the Synaxis site in Maroneia, Thrace. This resulted in the Synaxis Maroneias exhibition at the Toko Mansion in Kavala in 1991. He participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale that same year and in Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992. He returned to Athens. In 1995, he began collaborating with the Austrian group Der Blau Compressor and started the Workshop of Drawings and Images in Crisis, which, apart from being the title of the corresponding work, is the studio that encompasses all the artist's activities. Parts of the Workshop's archives were exhibited in 1999 at the Zoumboulakis Gallery. In 2001, a retrospective exhibition was held at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. His works were exhibited in October of the same year in Frankfurt, where Greece was the guest of honor at the International Book Fair. In 2005, he represented Greece at the 51st Venice Biennale with the work "Hospital."