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Demetrios Vakras was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1962. He has been painting with oil paints since 1977 and has never wavered from his elucidation of the bizarre, fantastic and surreal. He is self-taught. He has a great distaste for the pretensions of artistic aspirants whose lack of any real talent is celebrated as the quintessential ingredient that actually defines them as "artists". Australian art "culture" is such that commercial galleries have baulked at exhibiting his work. The only art that sells in Australia is either "Australiana" or the internationally celebrated faux-avant-garde: faux because avant-garde it is not. It is old-hat. Nearly a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp declared "found objects" to be art. And, it was 1938, at the International Exhibition of Surrealism (Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris) that Salvador Dali exhibited his installation Rainy Taxi. Ever since, the art-world seems to have developed the mnemic abilities of Alzheimer's sufferers - looking at every installation as if it were totally new, never before seen: avant garde! "Avant garde" thus becomes nothing more than the constant recycling of yesterday's ideas. In desperation Vakras has, in the past, exhibited with groups such as the Contemporary Art Society of Victoria Inc. Since 1996 he has participated in group shows at the artist-run gallery Roar Studios in Melbourne. His first solo exhibition at Roar Studios, was held 1 -13 June 1999. This exhibition also included his digital images of that year. Paintings on this site were exhibited at the CASspace, Collins St Melbourne from 17 February 2000 - 16 March 2000 ..........
"Vakras...explores...the human form unfleshed and revealed...[his] images will astonsih and amaze [with the] electric fluidity with which the images are executed."Tessie Virgiotis, Vibe magazine. June 1999 [MORE]
"If you're prepared for a hint of the macabre, why not take your subconscious to a surreal new level when you visit this show." Jane Rocca, theAge Citysearch. February 2000 [MORE]
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The official vakras.com site....
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