Biography

Achilleas Apergis was born in Garitsa, Corfu, in 1909, he was a member of a large family. During his childhood, he attended drawing lessons at Corfu's Night School (1918-1920), but as he grew older he tried to make a living through commercial activities. From 1937 until 1939, he moved to Athens and enrolled in the School of Fine Arts where he attended courses under Thomas Thomopoulos, Kostas Dimitriadis and Michael Tombros. In 1945, he married painter Irene Apergis. After the end of World War II, Apergis gradually abandoned representational sculpture in academic style and shifted towards abstraction. Although he was actively participating in exhibitions since 1948, his first solo exhibition took place in 1955 at Ilissos Gallery in Athens. Since the late 1950s onwards, his most recognizable and characteristic way of working with welded metal bars emerged through the formation of dynamic animal-shaped compositions. After 1960, his sculpture figures referred to ruinous vertical shapes. He participated in numerous group exhibitions such as the Avanguadria e Sperimentazione in Modena and Venice in 1978, the Environment – Action at the Zappeion in 1981 and the Grieks Festival at the Nieuwe Kerk church in Amsterdam in 1981. He represented Greece in international events such as, inter alia, the São Paulo Biennale (1957), the Alexandria Biennale (1957) and the Venice Biennale (1968). He collaborated with major Greek galleries such as Nees Morfes, the Athens Art Gallery and the Desmos Art Gallery. From the mid-1970s, Apergis developed his projects inside spaces and produced complete room-size installations, as he did in 1976 at the Espace Cardin in Paris. In this context, he began using scale compositions from wood, as in his solo exhibition at the Desmos Art Gallery in 1981, or from bronze, as in the public sculpture installed in Palaio Faliro in 1985. He died in Athens in 1986.