Missouras Tassos (1963)

Born in Larissa in 1963. He studied painting at the ASFA under Dimitris Mytaras, Rena Papaspyrou, Yannis Moralis and Dimitris Koukos (1981-1986), and continued on a French state scholarship at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris under L. Cremonini (1987-1991). In 1988 he obtained a 3-year Greek state scholarship for studying at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs.
His first solo exhibition at the Athens Art Gallery in 1991 featured representational paintings with the clear influence of his teacher L. Cremonini: empty, closed interiors, the signs of abandonment and patina and the figures petrified by fear characterise his early works. By contrast, in his subsequent series (Athens Art Gallery, 1995 & Terracotta Gallery, Thessaloniki 1996) the artist fills his large canvases with human figures. Through such familiar scenes as a forest picnic or a religious litany, his anthropocentric painting conveys a world with symbolic and metaphysical extensions into the unconscious and the dream. In the Dream Navigator series (Frissiras Museum, 2006) he constructs a strange, contradictory world with various references to chapters of the history of art and classic literature. His weird human figures are set in a symbolic context, laid out so as to subvert the logic of the image. His more recent works (Fluid Frames, Evripidis Gallery 2017), focus on faces painted large, out of proportion to the bodies, possibly in order to emphasise them. Their bodies are bent, distorted, and seem to hover between the real and the imaginary.
He has had solo exhibitions in Greece and Europe, and has participated in numerous group shows and foires in Greece and abroad. His works can be found at the Frisia Museum, the Fondation “L’Estree” Ropraz, the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, the Frissiras Museum, the Ministry of Culture, the Municipal Galleries of Larissa and Rhodes, the Moschandreou Gallery and in private collections in Greece and abroad.