Suggested by Dodona, 2001
Studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1979– 84) under professor Dimosthenis Kokkinidis. He taught painting at the Children’s Department of Art, Halkida (1985–90). Since 1979, his work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and other countries (U.K., Italy, Germany, Estonia, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, China, Japan). In 1994, he received the Prize for Best Art Stand as part of the Greek participation at the Alexandria Biennale.
In 2004, he received the second prize of the public at the Museum of New Art, Estonia, as part of an exhibition dedicated to the Athens Olympics. Since 1987, he has taught painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts, since 2014 as professor and director of the 5th Painting Studio.
In Suggested by Dodona, of 2001, the poetic atmosphere, the existential quests, the desolate landscape of the artistic narration, the solitariness of human existence are features which Manousakis negotiates in a work which takes as its subject Dodona and the Sacred Oak. At this most ancient of oracles, the presence of the famous oak-tree of Dodona, with its prophetic properties, connotes the personified goddess Nature. The artist shows the tree with its provocative green foliage bending all its branches towards man, who, enraptured by the touch, turns his back upon the onlooker. Beneath the tree, people used to drive away evil with the blowing of the wind and the sound of the kettles. The artist replaces the rattling for the exorcism of evil with limewash. Lime serves for the cleaning, the disinfection of the tree. The artist's man hears the pulsations of the earth, the rustling of the leaves touching his face and his soul. Man and tree are in a closed cyclical relation-pattern, in which man takes from nature, and nature from man. This is an endless, two-way, cyclical, life-giving movement. It is Man and the Tree.
Τhe work was created for the exhibition 'Sketching out Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday. Young Greek Artists: A tribute to Prefecture of Yiannena".' held at the Averoff Museum of Modern art, at Metsovo in 2002.
