From Catastrophe to Rebirth, 1968

Vangelis Moustakas was involved in plastic art from his adolescence, when, working in the 'Keramikos' district, he made sculpture, sometimes from his own inspiration and sometimes based on copies of vessels in the Archaeological Museum. He studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1950-1953) under Michalis Tombros and continued the study of engraving and decoration at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence (1960 - 1963) with Berti, Viani, and Albano, specialising in the casting of bronzes at the Art Foundries of Bruno Bearzi. The wealth of the artist's experience and training is reflected in the breadth and variety of his created work, as that is expressed by the grandeur of his representational statuary and his expressionistically abstract monuments. In his work he has assimilated stimuli from the ancient Greek tradition and his modern 'Europeanised' environment, while he redefines the material as a means of communication of his personal ideals. Though he has concerned himself with a host of subjects and techniques, the connecting link in the whole of the artist's creation is the expressionistic style by which he manifests his thinking about issues.
Moustakas belongs to the generation which at a very early age came face to face with the hardships and consequences of the Second World War. The memories and strongly-felt concerns of the artist over that period find their expression with particular emphasis in the series of works of the period 1960 to 1970 in which he deals with the horror and consequences of war, of being trapped - and the inability of man to escape from this.