Philip Tsiaras

Philip Tsiaras was born in 1952 in Nashua, New Hampshire. His mother comes from Elassona, Thessaly, and his father from Prosvoro, a village in Western Macedonia. He graduated from the Amherst College, where he studied Comparative Literature, worked with Lucas Samaras, and after winning a prestigious award for his own poetry, he traveled to Greece on a fellowship in 1976 to translate modern Greek poetry into English. When he returned to the United States he started to work with photography, an occupation that evolved to the series of Family Album. At the same time he was exploring the relations between writing and visual representation. He states that: "each word is a rich world unto itself -a panoply, an icon, an untamed horse, a demon of description". Tsiaras works in a great range of mediums, including painting on canvas, glass, ceramic, bronze and photography. He has presented more than 70 solo exhibitions all over the world. Works of him belong to the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and other important museums in Italy, Germany, United States and Austria. His last participation in the 2001 Venice Biennale was a great success. Some 20,000,000 visitors saw his Social Climber, a three meter high sculpture, situated for five months in front of the Canale Grande. In addition to that Philip has just completed two one person exhibitions in Istanbul and Athens, Greece.