Yannis Tsarouchis: Dancing in Real Life

Yannis Tsarouchis was a Greek painter whose multifarious practice spanned seven decades, from the 1920s to the 1980s. More than three decades after his death in 1989, the artist’s rich oeuvre remains relatively unknown outside of Greece, where he is recognized as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. This catalogue is published on the occasion of the first major survey of his work outside of his home country, which is also the first exhibition in the United States devoted to his work. The show brings together over two hundred paintings, drawings, watercolors, stage designs, and photographs, including portraits of anonymous youths, homoerotically charged mise-en-scenes, and major allegorical paintings referencing religious iconography augmented with contemporary costumes and props.

The foundation of Tsarouchis’s artistic sensibility involved negotiating the difference between the promise of modernization and the spell of tradition, as well as the gradual elaboration of this difference in his personal politics, which aimed at subverting the gender binary. Portraying solitary young men in interiors—daydreaming, gazing pensively, reclining, relaxing, and enjoying their own company—Tsarouchis formulated a unique artistic language. His works establish their own symbolic universe, mixing personal memory, loss, and desire, pointing to the negotiation and transgression of limits between art and the everyday that were central to his work and philosophy.

Yannis Tsarouchis: Dancing in Real Life includes numerous works spanning the artist’s career, including his thirteen-year exile in Paris, showing how he absorbed and transformed such influences as Greek folk traditions; ancient Greek and early Christian art; Byzantine mosaics, frescoes, and icon painting; the Greek shadow theater of Karaghiozis; and even the new languages of modern art (cubism, fauvism, and surrealism). It also features English translations of Tsarouchis’s writings and poetry.