#mytaras

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A collection of artworks by the Greek painter Dimitris Mytaras, who died yesterday.

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Dimitris Mytaras

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By Dimitris Mytaras

Photo taken at the National Gallery of Athens, 2021.

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On This Day: Dimitris Mytaras, Greek painter, was born

Dimitris Mytaras (Δημήτρης Μυταράς) was born on 18 June, 1934, roughly 80 kilometres from the Greek capital in Chalkida.

Dimitris grew up in the 1940s when the current art scene was dominated by Theodoros Stamos, Dimitris Koukos, Panayiotis Vassilakis, and Jannis Kounellis. The turn of the 19th century marked a departure from the Renaissance era that dominated the Greek art scene and impressionist artists were the driving force in the first half of the 20th century in modern Greece.

Mytaras began refining his craft between 1953 and 1957 at the Athens School of Fine Arts, (ASFA) and later at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) during the 1960s in Paris, to join the ranks of some of Greece’s most elite artists.

Little did Mytaras know at the time that he would join his tutors Yiannis Moralis and Spyros Papaloukas in the ranks of ASFA forty years later as a professor and rector.

His debut was finally marked by his first solo exhibition at Athens’ Zygos gallery in 1961.

Mytaras’ popularity grew and he started to become associated with European critical realism, which is marked by a political narrative and limited palette, during the period of the Greek military junta in the late 1960s until 1974.

By the end of military rule, Mytaras shifted to incorporate expressionistic elements and vivid colours in his anthropocentric works.