43rd Venice Biennale | Cyprus in Venice

43rd Venice Biennale
Angelos Makrides

Eleni Nikita

Makrides’ presentation was a series of sculptural installations in wood, stone, metal and other media. The work was imbued with identifiable modernist influences, simultaneously incorporating explicit references to the artist’s native environment and its ancient history, mythology and philosophy. By that time, Makrides’ practice had established him as one of the first conceptual Cypriot artists, exemplifying the essence of a peripheral, though internationally competent artistic production, viewed as bringing the local and the universal to an effective synthesis. Known for his idiosyncratic temperament and uncompromising nature, Makrides had no interest in travelling to Venice to set-up his show. The task was instead taken up by Maria Loizidou, the artist who had represented Cyprus in the previous biennale, who also designed the pavilion catalogue. On 26 June, just after the official opening, Corriere della Sera published an overall review of the shows, commenting among others on the “great neoanthropological interest” of Makrides’ work.

Works: Burial Gifts for a Child, Burial Gifts, The Riddle of the Sphinx, Man-Bird I, II and III, Bird, Siblings, Sun

Angelos Makrides, Burial Gifts for a Child, 1988.
Angelos Makrides, The artist next to one of his works & siblings, 1988.

Artist(s)

Angelos Makrides

Angelos Makrides (b.1942, Yialousa) lives and works in Nicosia since 1986. He studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Art (1961-1967) with Thanasis Apartis. He worked in Paris (1967-1969), in Nicosia (1969-1974) and in Athens (1974-1986). Makrides represented Cyprus at the 43rd Venice Biennale of Art, as well as the 36th Venice Biennale of Art together with four other Cypriot artists.

Curator

Eleni Nikita
Born in Nicosia. She studied Social Sciences at the University of Geneva. She is a Ph.D. of the University of Athens in the history of Art. She worked at the Center for Social Research (1971-1977) and in the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture (1977-2009), which she served as director from 2003 to 2009. She was for many years the representative of the Ministry of Education and Culture in the Committee on Culture the Council of Europe and various committees of the European Union. He was also Secretary General of the Cyprus National Committee of UNESCO from 2001 to 2009. He is the author of many studies, works of art criticisms and books on modern art. Her book “Christoforos Savvas, the beginning of a new era in Cypriot art”, was honored with the 2009 State Prize of Literature in the essay-research class. He was honored by the French government with the Order of the Knight of the Order of the Academic Phoenix and by the Austrian government with the Honorable Cross for Arts and Sciences. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the Society of Historic Art of Greece. Since 2012 she has been working with the Leventis Art Gallery as a curator of the Cypriot collection of the LA Leventis Foundation.

location

Italian Pavillion (Giardini di Castello)