Vlassis Caniaris
Artist
Biography
Vlassis Caniaris (1928–2011) was a Greek painter, regarded as one of the leading artists of Greek modernism and part of the so-called Generation of the Diaspora. Born in Athens, he abandoned medical studies in 1950 to study at the Athens School of Fine Arts and worked with Yannis Tsarouchis on stage design. He lived in Rome from 1956, where he co-founded Gruppo Sigma in 1959, and in Paris from 1961, where he connected with the Nouveaux Réalistes and Pierre Restany. Forced to leave Greece in 1969 because of his involvement in the resistance to the military dictatorship, he settled in West Berlin in 1973 as a DAAD fellow and devoted himself to the theme of immigrants and migrant labour. In 1975 he became a professor at the National Technical University of Athens; he died in Athens in 2011.