Stelios Stylianou

It is said that as you get older you become more aware of your roots. With the material bronze, Stylianou resorts to a cultural technique which in the 2nd millennium B.C. in his native Cyprus was developed and to whose copper wealth the island owes its name (kypros).

Stylianou’s most recent group of works, created since 2019, includes an extensive series of small-format bronzes, which belong more to the relief in their tow-dimensional design. It is not difficult to recognize the iconographic and formal repertoire, which he had already developed in earlier drawings and paintings. Female figures in softly flowing shapes such as Standing, Sitting, Lady in Green, Seated Girl or Mermaid alternate with profile views of heads, which in their strong stylization, combine antique with modernist forms. There is, for example, the highly abstract, gold-toned bronze, in which alone the elongated angled “Nose” refers to the subject of the head or a mask. The “Youth” (2019) with detailed Greek physiognomy and black-green patina is reminiscent of the heroic times of Hellenism. Also the expressive head fragment (2019) with the lateral eye and the line running from the crown to the nose blends archaic with modernist stylistic elements.