DIMITRIS YEROS

Dimitris Yeros was born in Greece. He was one of the first artists to present Performances, Body Art, Video Art, and Mail Art in Greece.

He has had 58 individual exhibitions in Greece and abroad. He has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions, Biennales and Triennales in many parts of the world.

He is collaborating among else with Throckmorton Fine Arts in New York, Holden Luntz gallery in Palm Beach, Pablo Goebel Fine Art in Mexico City and DL Gallery in Athens.

His works are included in many private and public collections such as National Portrait Gallery -London, The British Museum -London, Museum Bochum -Germany, Tate Britain -England, International Centre of Photography- New York, Maison Europeenne de La Photographie-Paris, Tama Art Museum-Tokyo-Japan, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Harry Ransom Center, Museum of Modern Art Barranquilla, National Gallery-Greece, Benaki Museum-Greece and elsewhere.

The following books are available to order: Click on the image for full details.

When an artist works in two different genres, one naturally looks for the links between the two different kinds of art he makes. Dimitris Yeros is a very individual painter, with an instantly recognizable style. He is also an immensely skilled photographer, whose images of the nude have the flawless poise of Greek classical sculpture.

One might expect, perhaps, that the paintings would resemble the photographs, but this is not the case. At times they seem like the product of two quite separate artistic personalities. There are, of course, things that they share. The chief of these is their affiliation to Surrealism. A nude young woman will have a torso wreathed in ivy, and her skin will be adorned with snails.

An equally nude young man, seated behind a table, will studiously ignore the pea-hen perched at one corner. Not all the photographs are like this. Some are celebration of the athletic male body, with no additional accoutrements.

Some are penetrating informal portraits of literary and artistic celebrities. These testify to the breadth and variety of Dimitris Yeros’s friendships.

Where else but on his Internet web site would one find the American artist Jeff Koons cheek-by-jowl with the great Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez? A recent series, still in progress, consists of images that comment on the poems of Cavafy, often using contemporary celebrities as surrogates for the now-departed poet. Whatever their subject-matter, the photographs have complete technical control, and an unerringly extroverted sense of style. When one looks at Yeros’s paintings and at the prints related to them, the situation seems very different. The link to Surrealism is still there – in fact, it is even closer.

But the paintings are introverted where the photographs are extroverted. They have nothing to do with the sensuality of the body, fascination with which plays such an important role in many of the photographs. The paintings are concise emblems – each is a summary of an emotional state. Certain basic images recur – birds, for instance, and fish – but these are reduced to their most basic, diagrammatic form. When human beings are portrayed, they too are diagrammatic. Yeros’s typical ‘running men’ remind us of the men in bowler hats that regularly appear in paintings by Magritte. They are never individuals, but cloned versions of a bourgeois everyman. Why does this contrast exist? Photography, as an artistic medium, is dependent on the external world. That is to say, the photographer has to find something – some body, some place, some incident in the external world – that he wants to portray. Of course, he can to some extent create these incidents.

The snails and the pea-hen, included in two of Yeros’s photographs that I have just described, did not arrive of their own accord. He had to imagine their presence, find them, and then use them for his own purposes. Paintings do not require this process of discovery and compilation – or only sometimes, not invariably. Yeros’s paintings are snapshots of his own psychological condition – but to make them he does not need a camera. He only has to look into himself, with an unblinking gaze. This cool consideration of the self is certainly something that Cavafy would have sympathized with, though he offered his own results in such a different form.

EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH

Click on a photograph to enter the corresponding Gallery

Portraits	For A Definition Of The Nude	Theory Of The Nude	Photos On Cavafy

Return To Arcadia	A Lesbos Diary	Antiquities	Whithout Luggage

Paintings	Prints

The Exuberant Flowering of Dimitris Yeros

And you must see and accept this world, ...

THIS small, this great world.

Odysseus Elytis, from Axion Esti "Genesis IV"

by John Wood

Dimitris Yeros is unique in the world of art for he is both a great painter and a great photographer. Most painters who have also been photographers have not approached photography as an original means of artistic expression. They have used photographs as they would sketches and created them as studies for what they consider their most serious work. The resulting images are, therefore, more interesting as artifacts of the creative process than as works of art. In a few rare cases, those of painters Thomas Eakins, Jose Maria Sert, Alphonse Mucha, Franz von Stuck, Frank Brangwyn, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, their photographs are occasionally powerful works of art in their own right. However, one can still see--except in the case of Eakins--that the photograph was always merely a means to an end, a brilliant drawing in light that served to aid in the creation of a painting. This is understandable because seeing with a photographer's eye and seeing with a painter's eye are two distinctly different kinds of vision which demand two distinctly different kinds of craft. It is the same with poetry and prose. Both are literary arts, but how many great poets are also great novelists? There are hardly any, and there are only two great painters who have also been great photographers--Man Ray and Dimitris Yeros, two artists who actually have much in common.

Yeros, just as Man Ray did, approaches his twin arts from radically different positions so that his paintings look nothing like his photographs. Both artists developed an aesthetic of photography distinct and separate from their aesthetic of painting. In photography Yeros is an acknowledged masters of the nude, as was Man Ray, and his photographs, like Man Ray's, are primarily driven by beauty. They immediately appeal to the senses and to the emotions. Yet his paintings, again like Man Ray's, are surreal and reach far beyond reality, beyond the world of senses and the flesh. Though their appeal is as immediate as the appeal of his photographs, it is an appeal to the intellect as it tries to understand and make sense of what he is showing us. And finally the paintings do make very good sense and are become quite clear. But initially Yeros's paintings also turn sensual in their appeal because the mind does not worry with making "sense" of them and realizes that much of their "sense" lies buried in their rich sensuality--in their juxtapositions of startling imagery and manipulations of color as shimmering and delicate as Mark Rothko's.

One might ask, but why create a world that is not real, a world that only resembles reality. It is often the case that a resemblance to reality will speak with greater force and truth than the reality we are used to seeing. Those things that daily pass before our eyes and our minds finally do not register with us, and we forget even how to see them. It often takes a jolt or a shock to make us actually stop and see something and think about it, and that is what the paintings of Dimitris Yeros give us--a visual shock that forces our minds into reflection.

Look at these strange paintings of Yeros carefully for a moment and consider what it is we are actually seeing, what it is that he has created to delight our eyes and give our minds something to reflect upon. We see things we know well, the most important things of our lives and the most basic things of life on earth: trees, leaves, apples, thorns, birds, wind, water, clouds, blue sky, animals, mountains, and volcanos. But stop and consider the very words themselves: trees, leaves, apples, and so forth. They are among the most existential nouns of any language. They are the nouns that name the things that let us know we are alive on a living planet.

What about the volcanos, one might ask? Aren't volcanos ominous images? Of course, and they have certainly affected the history of Greece, but they are also proof of the planet's ongoing life and a part of the breathing, stirring world of rain, clouds, and wind. There is very little of the modern technological world represented in Yeros's paintings because most everything that world extols, bows down to, and worships is less important than the great gifts of life itself--wind and leaves, rain and falling apples. In his exuberant world Yeros makes only two mild concessions to technology. He needs a means of transport through his much loved blue skies and through the earth's blue waters, and so we sometimes find dirigibles and steamboats in his work. Zeppelin had perfected the dirigible by 1901, and the steamboat was a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century invention, so both of these inventions predate the watershed year 1914, the real beginning of the disastrous twentieth century, not only the bloodiest century in the world's history, but also the century in which we became more divorced from Nature than ever before. As we look at these paintings of Dimitris Yeros and consider them, the more we come to realize that they are Yeros's own rapturous hymns to Nature. And in spite of their strange and surreal juxtapositions, they are as classical at heart as antiquity itself.

A viewer, however, might wonder about the strange shapes flying through the air in so many of Yeros's paintings. The viewer could certainly recognize birds and fish and trees from the natural world about him, but these strange shapes initially strike a person as something no one has ever before seen. The shape is clearly Yeros's most important symbol, an image he has used for years in painting after painting. It appear in much of his sculpture and medalic art and in over a third of the paintings in the book D.Yeros (Athens, 1997). These rich and potent forms suggest and resemble several things--clouds, of course, because they are floating in the sky. But because the shapes bend their tails in some of Yeros's paintings and sculpture, they suggest something living, and we naturally think of sperm, which also makes us reflect upon their phallic shape. However, they also resemble the fish that fly through the air in some of his paintings, and even the heads of some of his great clusters of birds, and the tip ends of his thorns. This shape seems to unite much of Yeros's imagery and blend it into the sexual and creative. It is as if this shape is both the great mystery of Yeros's paintings and the great mystery of the living world.

In the proclamation of the wind, flash out
That new and perpetual beauty
When the three-hour sun rises aloft
Totally blue, playing the harmonica of Creation.

"The harmonica of Creation"--it is an instrument that
Dimitris Yeros has mastered well.

John Wood is a poet and an art historian who has won major prizes for his work in both fields. He is the author of four books of poetry and fourteen volumes of criticism and history. He curated the 1995 Smithsonian Institution and National Museum of American Art exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber  and is the editor of 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography.

Jeff Koons	with Edward Albee	with Tom Wesselmann	with Pierre and Gilles

With Duane Michals

With Ai Wei Wei

With Alvaro Mutis

With Edmunt White

With Elena Poniatowska

With Jeff Koons

with Jonathan Franzen

With Mona Hatoum

DIMITRIS YEROS 

A Lesbos Diary 

77 pages, 8,5X7 inc. 

Published by Throckmorton Fine Art, New York 2020

Edward Albee and Dimitris Yeros

Another Narcissus
Phyllo Editions

This is a luxurious, cloth-bound 44-page book, in a 11”x8.25” (28x21 cm) format. US$ 25,00

Thirteen years ago the great American playwright Edward Albee, who passed away last September, wrote a poem entitled Another Narcissus, inspired by a photo taken by the Greek photographer Dimitris Yeros. Then, five years ago, while rereading the poem, Yeros was in his turn inspired by it to do a few more photographs which he has now printed in a book by the same title.

The introduction to the book was written by prominent poet and art critic John Wood.

It is a book of photographs and personal memories by Dimitris Yeros in 50 numbered and signed Copies.

A Luxurious cloth-bound handcrafted box 19.2x15x2.5 in. (49x38x6 cm) houses a signed copy of the book Dimitris Yeros Photographing Gabriel García Márquez, which was recently published by Kerber PhotoArt and two numbered and signed photographs, ready to be framed.

The book is of high-quality, large-format, cloth-bound, with 136 pages, size 9x12 in. (24x30 cm.), containing photographs taken by Greek painter and photographer Dimitris Yeros in sessions with the writer in Mexico and Colombia, which present García Márquez in some of the most beautiful moments of his last years, and create a powerful memento, a fond memory for all those who knew him and loved him through his books.

The Images are one silver print and one archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle cotton rug paper. Both are 12x16 in. (40x30 cm), numbered and signed by the artist on the verso. They can be signed on the front, inside the white margin by request.

Pricing begins at US$1350 that will increase as quantities become limited.

The book’s foreword was written by prominent art critic Edward Lucie-Smith. The extensive afterword was written by the photographer himself, who describes in it his relationship with the writer and details of their meetings.

“This book is fascinating because it shows us aspects of one of the greatest writers of our age. Each likeness is subtly different. Each is an avatar of a complex personality – complex enough to hide in plain sight. One might even go so far as to say that each is a loving betrayal. I am quite sure that those who turn these pages will find themselves looking at them, not once, but repeatedly. The point about Magic Realism in literature is that it seeks to present not just outer reality, but the operation of some kind of inner realm, linked to reality but somehow transcending it. That is what these portraits do here, thanks to the magic of the lens.”

Edward Lucie-Smith

Shades Of Love

Foreword by Eduard Albee. Introduction by John Wood.

A new book of photographs by Dimitris Yeros, out now in Greece, and in the rest of the world in January 2011, published by Insight Editions, California.
The book has 170 large pages, 31 x 26 cm, with thick cloth binding and a dust jacket.
It contains 67 photographs taken by Dimitris Yeros to illustrate an equal number of poems by C.P. Cavafy.

Price: €60 + postage

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Theory of the Nude

A book of B/W photographs of Nude Men,
112 pages, 31x25cm, duotone + varnish,
hard cover n' jacket,
with an introduction by P.Weiermair
director of Rupertinum, Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, Austria.
(Planodion, 1998)
Retail price US $50,00 included postage.

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For a definition of the NUDE

A book of colour and B/W photographs,
48 pages, 28x24cm, hard cover n' jacket,
with an introduction by P.Weiermair.
(Phyllo, 2000)
Retail price US $ 45.00 included postage.

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Periorasis

A book of B/W photographs, 80 pages,
33x25cm, duotone + varnish,
paper cover n' jacket,
with foreword by the French author
and Academician Michel Deon
and introduction by P.Devin
director of the Centre
Regional de la Photographie, France.
(Phyllo,1999)
Retail price US $ 35.00 included postage.

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D.Yeros

A full color book, 136 pages,
31x25cm, hard cover n' jacket,
with an essay by Academician
pr. Chrysanthos Christou
and texts by E. Kaknavatos,
T. Pavlostathis, Dr. Hans-Gunther Sperlich,
Heribert Becker, T. Gorpas,
Y. Patilis, G. Marcopoulos ect.
(Synechisa, 1997)
Retail price US $50,00 including postage.

Out of print

The following books have also been published on his work: