Description
ANDREAS CHARALAMBIDES
Cypriot, b. 1938
Andreas Charalambides was born in Paphos in 1939. He studied painting in Greece and in Britain. He co-operated with Stass Paraskos to establish the Cyprus summer School and Cyprus College of Art. In 1975 he was awarded a British Council scholarship to study British Art.
Benedict Read wrote about his work: “The work of Andreas Charalambides is certainly of the present, yet it is also timeless and resonant of the past… A suggestiveness, a sense of mystery pervades Andrea’s work, many paintings insistently maintain their detachment, much as the icons and mural paintings of medieval Cyprus remain relentlessly seeking to impose a sense of awe. Similarly the presence of shadows, the darker tones, apart from a universal psychic relevance or a reference to that present day political threat mentioned before, these passages of the dark evoke the enclosed, tenebrous majest of that original physical environment where one should truly view Byzantine church art in its genuine context, while the glowing colours, fretted in gold, of the icon may be the distant inspiration for the golds and translucencies of certain Charalambides paintings”
And Mary Rose Beaumont wrote in his latest catalogue: “The paintings of Andreas Charalambides are wonderfully intriguing. They are composed and executed with the skill of an Old Master yet they are unmistakably modern. On the one hand they contain within themselves the calm serenity of Pompeian frescoes and on the other hand they are resonant with the golden beauty of Early Renaissance altarpieces, yet they are painted in the full knowledge of the revolutions in art that have occurred in the twentieth century. Charalambides has forged his own unique language, a language which is essentially that of an artist steeped in Mediterranean culture, both ancient and modern, and in particular the myths and legends of his native land. The timeless quality which informs them is the heritage of classical antiquity.”
He has had 20 solo exhibitions and more than 20 group exhibitions in London and Nicosia (Gallery K), Athens, New York, Amsterdam, Beirut, Baghdad, Kuwait, New Delhi and Alexandria. He is based in his native historic town of Paphos.
