Fotis Zaprasis

Born 1940 on the easternmost border of Greece, Fotis Zaprasis lived through the Greek Civil War as a child. That he came to be among the 28 000 Markos-children who in 1949 were brought to safety outside Greece and given an education in the GDR – in hopes they would help create a Socialist Republic of Greece in some distant future – was for him a curse and a blessing at once.  

Living without his mother and family far away from his Greek homeland – at the beginning, in an orphanage – Zaprasis would recall that whole experience as a struggle, which he began to make visible in his art from the mid-1960s on. "[I was a] citizen of the world, uprooted among prisoners"[1] – thus would the East German painter describe his situation later. He learned to give expression to this experience primarily in watercolors. That medium possesses a transparency and a power of subtle emergence which permitted him to portray a ray of hope shining through, open a window to allegorical narratives, to faded memories of his homeland, and create Droste effects rich in metaphors.  

Zaprasis’ works are representational, but tend toward the poetic-surreal, as with his model Marc Chagall. They were shown in numerous GDR group exhibitions and in the national art exhibitions in Dresden. Despite – or perhaps because of – the perceived difficulty of life in exile for him, Zaprasis seems to enrich, paradoxically with a certain Mediterranean lightness, a society from whose Socialist objectives he distanced himself step for step. During his education as an industrial chemist in Leuna, the largest industrial complex of the GDR, Zaprasis began to feel his lack of enthusiasm for the work the East German state had cut out for him. So after meeting the painter Herbert Geheb in a people’s art circle, he abandoned chemistry to study, from 1960 to 1965, illustration and the graphic arts at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig. Together with his wife, the textile artist Christel Seidel-Zaprasis, he established himself thereafter as a freelance artist in Halle and also operated, with other colleagues, an independent print workshop from 1971 to 1991.  

Zaprasis always felt he was an outsider. Nevertheless, he made a name for himself early on with art that speaks volumes about his self-doubt and longings. He was included in official graphic art portfolios, contributed illustrations to children’s books, and designed inter alia the sets for a new ballet production celebrating the re-opening of Dresden’s Semperoper in 1985.  

The Moritzburg in Halle has custody of many of Zaprasis’ early works, but a museum retrospective of the work of this artist, who died young in 2003, has yet to be mounted. This despite the fact that he can be seen as living proof of the fact that the regulated art system of the GDR was never hermetically sealed off and was in important ways tied into the international art scene. Zaprasis was unable to visit his homeland until long after he had become a grown man and established artist. And so he never stopped searching for new expressive possibilities on the borderline between reality and imagination, between the feelings of being at home in a strange land and being a stranger at home. And he was not alone. Like Zaprasis, several other artists in exile in the Socialist Republic – for instance, the Basque painter Nuria Quevedo, the Spanish artist and cultural politician Josep Renau, or the Italian painter and architect Gabriele Mucchi – likewise addressed the experience of being uprooted in their art. This subject is today, in the context of the post-colonial discourse in art historiography and global art, more than ever a burning issue.

text: Sylvie Kürsten, translation: Darrell Wilkins

[1]  Fotis Zaprasis in an interview in the artist video portrait 2002. https://www.okmq.de/tv/mediathek/kmp-schaufenster-der-hs-merseburg/kuenstlerportraets/287-kuenstlerportraet-zaprasis-fotis-2002