Devoted to his art, Gabriel Andronikidis has striven for more than twenty years to master the expressive skills required in his work.Largely anthropocentric in character, his sculpture proclaims him heir to apurely ancient Greek tradition, comprising two fundamental characteristics:movement and stillness.
Andronikidis was born in Thessaloniki, where his grandfather made wooden lasts for shoes. He came at an early stage to see wood as both a utilitarian material and the raw material for art, and this idea would return to him later when he became interested in painting, icon-painting and sculpture,and had the good fortune to receive an excellent grounding in these areas from some of the city’s best-known artists – the sculptor Kyriakos Kambadakisand the painter Kostas Tsilsavidis.
Andronikidis’ sculptures range from classical figurative to abstract. Thes culptor moulds the material – whether wood, marble, stone or metal– as a master craftsman, deciphering at the same time the hidden codescontained within the material as product of nature. The potential carriedwithin it. The tension it is capable of bearing, the transcending of its limits.Compact or perforated surfaces, volumes carefully smoothed and planed to a velvet texture, emerge from his hands.
His work clearly attests to a pursuit of lasting harmony, permeated, however,by the result of a conscious struggle between visible and invisible, thereal and the hyper-real. Surrealist echoes in conceptual terms, in which he frequently advances sociopolitical concerns, as well as the use of materials which surface in his works recycled and acquiring new form and composition,placing him within the context of the trash art movement – thesefeatures permeate his sculptures with a singular expressionism, conveyingnot only the transformation of the material, but, and above all, providingan outlet for their inner potential.
The work of Andronikidis leaves the spectator with a sense of continual flux, ranging, depending on the material and the form given it, from poetry to crude exaggeration.
It is as if a powerful aura finds itself spectacularly transformed in his hands,attesting to his own technical training, his restless spirit and his versatile talents.