A Greek national, George Lappas was born in Cairo in 1950. After studying psychology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he went to India to study sculpture and architecture. He then studied at the AA School of Architecture in London and at the School of Fine Arts in Athens and Paris. He works and lives in Athens. He is one of the most recognized Greek artists of his generation.
Throughout his work, George Lappas has reflected on the limits of the body and its deviations from normality. To him, fragmentation, fluidity, discontinuity and destructuration represent the characteristics of contemporary analogical culture.
Lappas transforms everyday life to better transcend it. He animates mundane objects, gives life to images and fragments bodies to lead the spectator towards a new dimension and to give the impression of a metaphysical presence.
His sculptures take us into areas that we can comprehend only if we are willing to free ourselves of the preconceived images that the media overwhelms us with. The objects that he comes up with are not part of the collective imagination, or our iconography. Neither are they a reference to products whose design follows any form or fabrication constraints. Rather, deformation, remodeling and reorganization of volumes are the many expressions that pull you towards a non-Euclidean world and transform the visible into a “vision”. The titles of the sculptures follow the same principles and are to be read as hints for the interpretation of the artwork.
Lappas’ work is also applied to the representations of Western painting and sculpture. After studying some of the most famous works of art, he recreates them throughout the same spatial frame but from a different point of view; one that he has chosen in the painting and that he imposes onto the viewer, thus creating a new narrative and apprehension space.
