Christoforos Savva: Untimely On Time

Christoforos Savva is widely acknowledged as one of the most groundbreaking Cypriot artists of the 20th Century. In a relatively short period of time he produced an impressive and highly diverse body of works, ranging from the figurative paintings of the ‘50s to the abstract paintings, the sculptures, the experimentations with wire, cement, and fabric leftovers, as well as the forays in furniture design and the architectural interventions he undertook in the ‘60s. The coexistence of styles and the wide range of themes and references that appear in Savva’s work, from Greek and African Classical Art to Cypriot handicrafts, Folk Art, Informal Art, Pop Art, and avant-garde movements, all seem to suggest that strictly formal questions were not his main concern.

In 1968, Savva was one of the artists selected to represent Cyprus in its inaugural Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but only a few days after the opening, he died suddenly in Sheffield, UK.

Through more than ninety works, the exhibition Untimely on Time presented the inclusive, idiosyncratic diversity of Savva’s production, thus paying homage to a major figure of Cypriot art while aiming to provoke reflections on the processes that have shaped the post-independence national imaginary of Cyprus. Any such endeavour needs to take into account the fact that Cyprus, like many other countries with a colonial past, did not have the opportunity to deal with the ‘modern’ in a substantial and autonomous way. At least in so far as its art historiography and the international visibility of its artistic production are concerned, what has registered instead, is a sense that it ultimately chose to delve directly into the ‘contemporary’. Revisiting, then, this key moment in the island’s recent history becomes a fundamental step towards a better understanding of its contemporaneity.

The exhibition is held on the occasion of a double fifty-year anniversary associated with the participation of Christoforos Savva in the first official show of the Republic of Cyprus at the Venice Biennale in 1968, as well as the subsequent death of the artist in the same year. The exhibition was curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, exhibition design and exhibition architecture was designed by Studio Manuel Raeder. Accompanying publications in collaboration with Hatje Cantz and BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE, Berlin. This is the first of a series of events to be presented in the new State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL, until it operates under the statute of the Cyprus Museum of Contemporary Art, whose establishment is under way.