about stelios stylianou

Biography

Stelios Stylianou was born in Cyprus in 1948.
He lives and works in Switzerland as a designer and artist since 1980.

In his bourgeois profession, he designed ship engines for ocean liners at the Wärtsilä Group in Winterthur. Most recently and after his retirement, he developed with Dr. M. Ganser at Ganser CRS in Winterthur Injection systems for diesel engines.
But since childhood he drew and painted. Artists who visited his parents’ estate in Nicosia to draw people, animals and plants were his early inspiration.

Even many years later, whenever his professional and family environment permitted, he was artistically active. He deepened his autodidactic talents at art schools in England and Switzerland, visited museums and exhibitions, familiarized himself with the attitudes and basic tendencies of contemporary art.

His drawings and paintings take up a broad repertoire of classical modernism, play around and transform the figurations of Picasso, Matisse, Miro or Klee with subtle irony. Rhythmic ciphers and symbols often float over coloured backgrounds, antique ornamentation, geometric and vegetal forms. In spontaneous notation, wave-like and geometric signs are found for open, metamorphic constellations. Just as characteristic of his work, whether watercolours or acrylic paintings, are chromatic sensitivity and transparency of colours, which appear as a reflection of the bright light of the Mediterranean landscapes.

Dr. Phil. Volker Schunck 1)

Mission

Making his artworks accessible to a wide audience.

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