Asteriadis Agenor (1898 - 1977)

Born in 1898 in Larissa, he was apprenticed from a young age to painter Erato Asprogeraka-Valvi. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Georgios Roilos, Georgios Iakovidis, Spyros Vikatos, Pavlos Mathiopoulos and Nikolaos Lytras (1915-1921).
He presented his first solo exhibition at the Daphnopoulou Gallery in Larissa (1921). Before his appointment as drawing teacher in secondary education (1925), he made a living working for an advertising agency. He travelled around Greece, mainly in Thessaly and Macedonia, and found inspiration in the natural and architectural landscapes.
Apart from landscape painting, which makes up most of his oeuvre, he painted still lifes, nudes and portraits. He developed a personal idiom in tune with the quests of the ‘30s Generation, combining modernist elements with traditional formulas of Byzantine and folk art. His mature painting is characterised by the emphasis on formalisation and a flat perspective. He was also active in printmaking, publishing albums such as The Schwarz House at Ambelakia (1928, repr. 1974) and Children’s Drawings (1933, in collaboration with Spyros Vassiliou); the latter was awarded at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in Paris (1937). During the German occupation he published single-sheet prints with themes from folk songs. Active also in religious painting, he decorated churches, designed mosaics and portable icons and illustrated religious and literary books and school textbooks.
He was a member of the Union of Greek Artists (1925), participated in the reestablishment of “Omada Techni” (1930) and co-founded the “Stathmi” group (1950). After 1959 he taught freehand drawing at the Athens Technological Institute.
He presented his work in many solo and group exhibitions, and took part in Panhellenic and international exhibitions among which the Venice Biennale of 1934 and 1940 and the Biennales of Sao Paolo and Alexandria in 1959. Retrospectives of his work were organised at the Athens Technological Institute in 1961, the National Gallery in 1976 and the Benaki Museum in 2011.