Anemoessa, 1988
George Houliaras was born in Ioannina in 1947. He graduated from the Zosimaia School in 1964. From 1965 to 1970 he studied Sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts with Yannis Pappas. He graduated in 1970 with a prize for a nude figure and other commendations.
During 1975-77 is settled in Paris, where he studies Sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts (César studio), and Ceramics at the École Supérieure des Arts et Matiers. He exhibited works from the period of his studies at the Nees Morfes Gallery in January 1977. In the summer of that year he returned to Greece and set up a sculpture studio.
With two or three colleagues, creates the Sculptors' Association, with a view to holding open-air exhibitions and highlighting Contemporary Sculpture.
Since 1996 has served on the Administrative Council of the Graduates' Union of the Athens School of Fine Arts, with the aim of creating a place for meetings and contact between artists in the buildings ceded by the Ministry of Culture in the Plaka district. Organises, through the Events Committee of the Visual Arts Chamber of Greece, of which he is a member, of a series of visits to countries and regions abroad which are of Greek interest - Jordan, Syria, Sicily, and Cappadocia.
He has made solo exhibitions of his work and has participated in group exhibitions, including Panhellenic exhibitions, exhibitions of the Association of Sculptors, the “Balkan Sculpture Exhibition” in Bucharest (1981), where he received a distinction, and the Budapest Biennale (1988).
This small-scale sculpture of Houliaras is a schematized figure, an abstract composition. It is a mutilated bronze silhouette, inspired by ancient Greek models of sculpture. An archetypal mythological, nude recumbent figure interweave to create pediment of a female body.
The sculptor is liberated from specific references to the human figure and with an austerity of expression turns towards this rounded form, which is possessed of a sense of dynamic aspiration.
