Interview by Shannon Leahey
What are the Hellenic Heads?
The Hellenic Heads are a personal exploration of my personal roots, through over-lifesize head sculptures that have been inspired by six important periods in Greek history spanning 2,500 years. This series is a vehicle for, and the result of, my search for the influences that have shaped me and the people closest to me. I chose six periods in history that could be deemed to have ongoing influence on contemporary Greeks: the Classical Period, the Byzantine Period, the Greek War of Independence, the Destruction of Smyrna (of which the centennial is this year), the Nazi occupation and Greek Civil War, and finally, the Present. I researched each period, considering artifacts, family stories, and historical photographs. I looked at sculptural precedents for inspiration in the major museums of the world–in Athens, of course, but also in New York, Paris and Rome. With these foundations, I created these over-lifesize sculptures which I hope you will see at one of the venues to which the exhibition will travel, such as the Embassy of Greece from May 4 to June 10, 2022 or The Muses in Southampton, NY from July 2 to September 5, 2022, or other venues to follow.
What is the inspiration behind Hellenic Heads?
As a Greek-American—born in Athens and having spent more than half my life in New York City—I have always been engaged with, and sometimes overwhelmed by, my Greek roots. Starting from age 5 or 6, I was exposed to Greek antiquities by my aunt who was a tour guide to the Acropolis and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Later, at Harvard College, I studied liberal arts, including Classical Greek literature, philosophy and history, as well as modern Greek literature, taught there by Professor Savvides, the translator of Cavafy and Seferis. Later still, I made four visits to Mount Athos, where I was steeped not just in the Orthodox faith but also in Byzantine art; I recall being dumbfounded seeing icons and relics more than a thousand years old.
People soak up influences from their culture. You can spend your whole life rejecting that influence, but it’s the truth: It gets in your system. However, my portraits are not historical copies; they are personal interpretations. When I was sculpting Thalia, inspired by the Classical Greek Period, I looked not just to the piece of the same name in the Vatican Museums, but also to photos of my mother as a young woman in post-war Greece. When I was sculpting Archon, referring to the Byzantine Period, I looked not just to the colossal heads of Constantine the Great at the Capitoline Museums in Rome and The Met in New York, but also to photographs of my father as a young sea captain, working for Goulandris shipping interests, embodying leadership and clear vision ahead. For Heroines of 1821, I wanted to convey the strength, defiance and resilience of three female leaders in the War of Independence (Manto, Laskarina and the overlooked Domna Visvizi of Thrace) and found a modern Greek woman to sit for the piece, a woman with similar personality traits: My fiancée!
Some of your Hellenic Heads have been described as “dark.” Are they? Why?
Some, fortunately not all, are “dark” because they reflect the periods I studied. Studying the Destruction of Smyrna, including the experiences of my grandmother who survived it and the published diaries of her brother who fought in the war that preceded it, resulted in a sculpture conveying the sadness of losing their homeland, but also dignity in accepting their fate and rebuilding their lives in a new country, Greece. To study Greece in the 1940s was to learn about my father’s time in an internment camp, to learn about the vibrant Sephardic Jewish community of Thessaloniki whose members were sent to Treblinka, to visit “Pigada” near Meligalas where a relative, the local doctor, was executed in what was the beginning of the Greek Civil War. Many of us are fortunate to have never directly had such experiences in our lives, but similar phenomena exist today, like in the daily lives of Ukranians these past few months.
That said, the Hellenic Heads are presented as a unity, so these “dark” pieces are balanced by others that are “light”: The elegance and thoughtfulness of a classically inspired head, the strength and leadership of a Heroine of 1821, a young girl representing the Present, whose optimism reflects her future but also the optimism a nation and people might feel.
All of your Hellenic Heads are larger than lifesize. Some are nearly a meter tall. Why?
You see a lot of massive works in some of the ancient art from which I take inspiration, like the fifteen-foot-tall Sounion Kouros in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. If it is meant to be a representative of a person or the energy of a person, then maybe it’s not supposed to fit on a shelf.
Jeff Koons has said that scale changes the way the viewer perceives the work, even if it is the exact same work, enlarged. I have found this to be true as I often do similar works in different sizes, and I can see how viewers react to each. By the way, Jeff Koons is a devotee of the Greek and Roman Department at The Met, where I had the opportunity to meet him and talk in person.
Your art is focused on the human body, particularly the head. Why?
I find my fellow human beings to be the most fascinating, difficult, and rewarding subject. Relationships are important to me in every aspect of my life, which is not to imply that I always succeed at them. I often experience an inability to understand or to connect, which probably drives my interest in figurative sculpting.
As to the head specifically: It is the most human part of the human, the most expressive and the most difficult to convey and the most interesting when the conveyance succeeds.
What do you think your art says about the human condition?
I’m thinking of the title of the first book that came out about my work: “The Beauty of Imperfection.” I think that summarizes my views of our fellow human beings and of life generally: That there is beauty not in spite of but because of imperfections. We are far more emotionally touched by the flaws of the human condition than by any glossy ideal. Many of my pieces show imperfections, and I hope that you will perceive them as beautiful.
A feature of your work is that they don't have polished finishes. Can you talk about that choice?
Yes, that’s right. I don’t want the surfaces to be pristine or shiny; I want them to show their guts to the world. Lots of my pieces are a combination of materials. I’ve been intrigued by kintsugi pottery with its golden cracks; it’s not the idealized form that draws the eye, but rather its scars. Sometimes the process of carving and exposing layers gives an impression that I’m being brutal to them. But then, human existence can be rough work. I want them to show layers of experience just as humans do.
How did you come to use mixed media in this manner?
The traditional process–start with clay and go to plaster and/or wax and end up with bronze–has never been compelling to me. In that process, the work is in only one material at a time, with some exceptions by Rodin.
I start with clay to get the basic form and build the volumes. I fire it and then start going to work on it with power tools to subtract volume and epoxy clays to add volume. In doing so I create a variegated, often rough surface that I don't plan in advance, nor does it have a specific rationale. Often I add more materials including found bricks, stone and wood, and ferrous and copper based metals, paints and acids. Sometimes I like the patches of color and material to be tonal, other times for the contrasts to be stronger which can make the form “disintegrate.” This part of my process is indeed expressionistic, and I keep reworking the pieces until they seem “done” to me.
Talk about some of the inspirations behind your work.
If you are Greek, you can’t help but be inspired by antiquity. There is nothing like going back to ancient times. For example, one of my sculptures, “Boxer at Rest (Self Portrait)” is inspired by a Hellenistic bronze statue at the National Museum of Rome called “The Boxer at Rest” which was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. When I saw the piece in New York, I was floored. In that moment, I knew I needed to be a sculptor. It depicted a real person, a boxer who was beaten up, with cauliflower ears and open wounds in his skin. For my piece, I started with a model, Raymond, posing in a similar way to the historic work to get some of the initial forms. After he left, I kept working on the piece, and I found that it acquired personal significance. I realized that I too, although not violent, was a boxer at rest–I had been through major illness, divorce, and a few other challenges. My version of the boxer, like the original, has suffered damage, but is very much alive, still curious, maybe with a wry smile, and able to go back into the ring. Wouldn’t that also describe many Greeks we know?
A lot of my work is like that, with multiple inspirations both historical and personal. In the catalog essay for Hellenic Heads, critic and curator Katy Diamond Hamer asks: “How does one look towards the past with a mirror, and still see something new reflected back? This is something that many artists face in their respective practices as it’s nearly impossible to not be informed of, or inspired by art history.”
I fully agree. I do not want to sculpt figures without engaging with the figurative sculpture that came before, starting with Mesopotamian and Egyptian sculpture and traveling over 8,000 years to contemporary figurative work. I believe many of these prior investigations into the human subject are relevant. Like Alberto Giacometti, I do not believe that there is “progress” in art, that contemporary art is somehow better than older art. I see many ancient, Renaissance, neoclassical, 19th century heads that are more compelling than what I see in the commercial galleries today.
What about Rodin? He seems like another possible influence.
Yes, Rodin is an important influence. I recall the awe I felt when I first saw his Gates of Hell, at Stanford University in 1992. (I was getting my MBA there, and overlapped with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who was there for his master’s in international affairs. We wrote a paper together). To me, Rodin is the culmination of the Greco-Roman tradition of figurative sculpture. What started with the Archaic Kouroi and developed through the Classical and Hellenistic periods, was taken up after 1500 years in the Renaissance, expressed in new ways by Donatello and Michelangelo and later by neoclassical sculptors before Rodin came onto the scene in the late nineteenth century. After Rodin, there was a withering interest in the figurative, and the non-figurative “New Sculpture'' emerged in the 1950s alongside Abstract Expressionism in painting. In recent decades there has been an enthusiastic return to figurative painting and sculpture, a prominent example being Charlie Ray, who makes extensive references to ancient Greek sculpture. At present The Met in New York has a large retrospective of Ray’s work; in 2017-2018, George Economou, who collects his work, showed his work in Athens.
Acclaimed artist George Rorris, who is famous for representations of the human form, wrote that your sculpture reflects the "primitive sensuality" of your soul, "indomitable and unadulterated.” Would you say that true art originates in a primordial instinct, even though we often associate art with refinement and sophistication?
I have great respect for George Rorris, both as an artist–one of the most important working today not just in Greece but globally–and as a human being. I am honored that he wrote the essay that appeared in the book “George Petrides: Recent Work 2019-2021” from which you quote.
As to his specific comments: I think he is correct, and expressed it more poetically than I could have. There are many kinds of art, ranging from the cold, conceptual kind to the emotionally-driven “primitive” and “unadulterated,” to use his words. I am happy to be closer to the latter end of that spectrum, for two reasons: First, it is who I am, and I believe in the saying, “Be yourself - everyone else is already taken.” Second, I think that the qualities that Rorris refers to have real power. I hope you feel that power when you see the Hellenic Heads.
Is there good art that is refined and sophisticated? Of course! There are as many different kinds of art as there are artists, and viewers must judge for themselves what speaks to them.
Why focus on abstract sculpture rather than realist sculpture?
A lot of traditional sculpture, as well as contemporary sculpture, is what I would consider realistic. While realism takes a lot of skill, I find that less interesting because realism, like painting, has been affected by photography. Prior to photography, kings would commission portraits of themselves and disperse them amongst their many vassals. Everyone would say, “That is King Ludwig.” In the era of photography, that’s no longer an essential function of sculpture.
I find neo-expressionism very interesting. (Neo-expressionism is a style of late modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s.) For example, German and American neo-expressionists Georg Baselitz and Marcus Lupertz: In their work, you see all these colors and textures. When I see their work, I am not thinking that someone looks like that, I am thinking the artists are trying to convey emotion.
Would you tell us a few words about your initiation into the world of art?
I grew up in a family that was half artists (with a slant towards music; my first cousin is Tassis Christoyannis, one of the top opera singers in Europe) and half business people. Even as a child, it was clear to me that the life of the artist was not an easy one. After a liberal arts degree from Harvard College in 1985, I went to Wall Street. Then in 1996, the Muse beckoned and I started taking art classes in the evenings and on weekends; I discovered the New York Studio School, where I have taken classes over a 20 year period culminating in a Certificate in Sculpture; I have also studied at The Art Students League in New York and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where some important Greek artists studied: Apartis, Chryssa, Laskaridou, Sidiropoulos.
I had been flirting with making the switch to full-time working artist for many years, but didn't have the courage. Then in 2017, I experienced multiple deaths of friends and family within a two-week period, forcing me to evaluate what I wanted to do with my remaining years on this planet, and I committed fully to making art! In September 2018, a well-known Greek collector acquired a work of mine, and I thought, “OK, now I am a professional artist,” followed shortly by the thought, “I had better get into the studio daily and make more, and better, work!”
Since then I have had solo shows in Dubai, Monaco and Mykonos. I have participated in group shows in Athens, London, and New York, including a two-artist show at the Consulate of Greece in New York.
What draws you primarily to sculpture over other media?
In college, I took plenty of art history but no studio art, which is a pity because one of the significant sculptors of the 20th century, Dimitri Hadzi, also a Greek American, taught at my university when I was there.
So I didn’t take my first adult art class, an oil painting class, until I was in my early 30s, in 1996. I remember the first few pieces I worked on, and I recall the feeling of awkwardness. I was not a natural. Fortunately, I drifted toward drawing, which it turns out is the foundation of everything, including sculpture. Around 1998, I found myself at the New York Studio School in Greenwich Village, taking classes in the evenings and on weekend mornings. This went on for decades, part-time. At some point, in one of those random but meant-to-be occurrences, I wandered into a sculpture class and my hands worked with a mind of their own. I felt as the French sculptor Auguste Rodin said he felt when he first touched clay: That he was in Heaven.
In a larger context, sculpture is a Greek tradition. Oil painting is primarily what 20th century European artists did, but sculpture is what my Greek ancestors did from Archaic times (7th century BC) into the Byzantine era, when colossal statues of Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to espouse Christianity, were placed throughout the empire.
How did the lockdown as a result of Covid affect your work?
Oddly, it was a productive period for me. I worked without interruption, often twelve hours a day, much of it in isolation. This deepened my commitment and my practice of making art daily. A side effect of the pandemic that I never could have foreseen was that people I didn’t know found me on the internet and started buying art without seeing it in person. It seems they were sitting at home and possibly redecorating. This too advanced my value as an artist. In the last two years this has developed further. Now, some of my art I sell online to people I have never met, some to people I already know, some to visitors at in-person art shows.
Tell us about the show that juxtaposes your work with that of Nassos Daphnis.
I am grateful to Consul General Konstantin Koutras, who invited me and the estate of Nassos Daphnis to exhibit at the Consulate from December 2021 to February 2022. To show at a prestigious venue in New York, the city to which both Daphnis and I came at a young age and chose to live and work, was an honor. Dr. Koutras, Cultural Attache Evelyn Kanellea and their colleagues supported the exhibition strongly, and we had many visitors, ranging from Greek and Greek-American VIPs to members of the New York art world, including critics and curators from major museums.
Daphnis was an important artist, and his works can be found in the collections of many prominent museums like The Met, MoMA, Guggenheim, and Whitney in New York and the B&E Goulandris in Athens. Born in Krokees, near Sparta, in 1914, he came to New York around the age of seventeen. Like me, he had another career which supported him and his growing family, and like me, he did not have a conventional art education. I found the pairing fascinating because the two artists came from similar backgrounds to the same city, but made art that was at polar opposites, figurative sculpture and abstract painting. It’s a pairing worth ruminating on, including what does it mean to be a Greek-American artist?
Paul Laster, Curator, commented: “Taking a traditional approach to figurative sculpture, Petrides mines the past to create something new and when making his Pixel Fields/Aegean Series paintings, Daphnis tapped into new technology to update modernist abstraction. Petrides’ sculpted figures are perceptively born from the primordial mud of ancient cultures and modified in the artist’s hands, whereas Daphnis cleverly combined computer-generated graphics from an Atari ST with his own particular painting process.”
More information, photos, on that exhibition can be found here.
Do you plan a piece far in advance or is the idea constantly changing?
I’ll start with an idea, so there’s a core of something that might stay constant, but my process is exploratory, so I don’t have it planned out all in advance. I tend to think of that process as image-seeking rather than image-making, another connection to the neo-expressionists. Basquiat didn’t start with a vision of a finished piece–you can see him crossing out and reworking things right there on the canvas. I strive for the same, albeit in sculptural form.
For example, Life during Wartime, the piece for Hellenic Heads that takes as inspiration the struggles of the 1940s in Greece–I’ve been working on it for over a year. While I knew that historical inspiration before I started and I knew I wanted the piece to focus on the experience of average Greek civilians, the piece itself evolved and changed a lot over time.
You mention “Sculptural Precedents” in your working process. Explain.
I often draw inspiration from historic pieces, ranging from the Kouroi to Rodin, not to make a copy, but to see how an accomplished sculptor dealt with similar issues. Sometimes this helps me find my “way in” with my sculpture, although the end result may bear little similarity. For example, when I was starting on my piece related to the Destruction of Smyrna, The Catastrophe, I was thinking about my grandmother and how she might have looked and felt in September 1922 when the city was burned and she lost her whole way of life. Call it serendipity; on my drive back from Monaco, where I had a solo exhibition, to Athens, I stopped in Florence for a few nights. There, at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, I saw two works that left me in awe: Donatello’s Habbakuk (1423-26) and Michelangelo’s Deposition (1547-1555). When you look at The Catastrophe, you may pick up on subtle references to both masterpieces.
You have talked about your commitment to ancient Greek sculpture and to non-Greek sculptors, but what about modern Greek sculptors?
The two that excite me most are Yannoulis Chalepas and Yannis Pappas. Both are well represented at the National Glyptotheque in Goudi, which has to be one of the least visited museums in all of Europe. Whenever I visit I am usually the only person there. The Chalepas holdings by the Glyptotheque and by the Onassis Foundation are simply astounding. The other day when I was stuck on a part of Heroines of 1821, I picked up a Chalepas catalog (from the excellent Tellogleio exhibition) to see how he had dealt with a similar issue. It worked!
Yannis Pappas’ home and studio, an annex of the Benaki Museum in the Zografou area, are incredible, with a large cache of Pappas works and an air as if the sculptor were just around the corner and about to return and pick up his tools. Inspiring!
After all those years living outside of Greece–not just as an artist–would you say that your "Greekness" still defines your artistic expression in the same way it did in the beginning?
Yes, I believe so. Although I have lived most of my life in the New York area, my contact with Greece–the language, the culture, the country–has been continuous. Growing up in New York, my parents behaved as if they were on their way back to Greece, and indeed, upon my father’s retirement, that is what they did. As for me, I spent five of my teenage years in Athens, and like many Greek-Americans, visited every summer. So, I have always felt connected to my “Greekness,” generally as well as artistically.
Do you think the viewer's experience of your work changes depending upon how familiar they are with Greek history and culture?
Inevitably, viewers bring their own experiences and prejudices to the work, and that will always be the case. For example, the piece in the Hellenic Heads exhibit that celebrates the heroines of 1821–a Greek person who knows a lot about the Greek War of Independence is going to view it differently than someone who has never heard of any of this war, which Greeks call “The Struggle”
When I list emotions on some of the signs in the exhibition, it’s what I felt when I was working on the piece, and that has to do with my own very personal experiences and family history. Even so, I think that it’s possible that by looking at the piece, the viewer can feel some of the same.
And I take it seriously that these pieces can have an educational function as well, about Greek history and also about art history. I always try to give viewers some information about the historical inspiration as well as sculptural precedents. Part of what I want them to feel is inspired to learn more, whether it’s about the destruction of Smyrna or about Rodin’s work.