Kalfayan Galleries  present the exhibition “Giorgos Ioannou (1926 - 2017) – POP?”. The exhibition is the starting point of a series of future  projects aimed at  
promoting - both in Greece and abroad - the work of Ioannou, one of the most important painters of the post-war period. A collector of images and  objects with 
influences from comic books and Pop Art to Art Nouveau, Ioannou developed a purely personal visual idiom where the experience becomes an image, the comic  
co-exists organically with caustic socio-political commentary, personal memory meets collective memory, the present goes hand  in hand with the past, and reality  
intertwines with the imaginary. 
 
The exhibition presents works mainly from 1970s and illuminates the hybrid, essentially anti-pop character of Ioannou's work. He clearly used the language of  
Pop Art  (comics, posters, product packaging) but he never embraced the Pop culture of his time. On the contrary, Ioannou was suspicious of it. The Pop Art of 
the Greek artist  was denunciatory and did not share the optimism of its American manifestation. Ioannou appropriates the visual language of pop art to address  
on the one hand the  political situation and on the other hand to criticize the then emerging culture of mass consumption and its symbolic use in the Western world  
as a synonym for freedom.
 
It is no coincidence that he first used the expressive vocabulary of Pop Art -mainly inspired by the style of comics and graphic novels (intense solid color, strict
black outlines) - as soon as he felt the need to denounce the dictatorship (1967-1974) in Greece. Thus he joined a tradition of artists whose artistic practice comes
as an instantaneous result of their interaction with the socio-political realities of their time and who use a pure and explicit artistic vocabulary that allows for the
message to be as direct as possible: as George Grosz uses caricature in the 1920s or John Heartfield in the 1930s uses photomontage. The latter was also
used in the 1960s and 1970s by artists such as Martha Rosler and Linder Sterling. Ioannou employs his inspiration from comic books in a similar way: to
construct a highly personal language which is necessary to express clearly and effectively his message of aphorism/protest during a dark period of modern
Greek history.
 
The main axis of the exhibition constitute works from the 1970s that combine features of Pop Art with elements of Naive Art or Surrealism, which compose
an idiosyncratic painting, an independent trend in Greek painting of the period. The exhibition includes also early works which mark the first steps in using
contemporary posters as visual elements in the composition, as well as works from the 1980s when Giorgos Ioannou, having moved on to different content
searches, uses elements of Pop Art but in a clearly personal immersive style of painting.