Theodoulos Gregoriou

Theodoulos Gregoriou was born in Malounta of Nicosia in 1956. He lives and works in Nicosia and Paris.

With a scholarship from UNESCO, from 1976 to 1981 he studied Painting at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute for Fine Arts in Bucharest. He continued on a scholarship from the French Government and enrolled at the Cité internationale des arts and School of Fine Arts in Paris (1986–1987).

His participation in the Venice Biennale (Aperto 1990) was the beginning of a significant presence in the international art scene. He has created monumental works in public spaces in Cyprus, France and Greece. He has presented his work in many solo, and international group exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad.

Having grown up next to an ancient (Bronze) copper mine, Theodoulos is guided by the geographical and memorial potential of material and substance. Directed by Aristotle’s principle ‘Matter brings in itself the principle of motion and change but takes shape and image with the intervention of the mind’, he seeks to unite seemingly opposed (chronological, spatial, cultural, geographical, chemical) elements through art. Thanks to abstract structural patterns, the artist allows these foreign components to co-exist. Using digital technology, the artist bypasses his process’ ‘nowness’ in search of something more timeless, less bound in the moment. 

Among his most emblematic works was the exhibition in the gallery of Cypriot Antiquities at the Louvre Museum which was presented between 2008 till 2010 and entitled “Cyprus, from the Neolithic Age to Theodoulos”.

Also, the work which Theodoulos installed in the UNESCO building in Paris with the title “Kyttara; Cells – Choirokoitia” and was the sequel to the “Cyprus, from the Neolithic Age to Theodoulos” work which was exhibited at the Louvre Museum.  

These creations started out from the settled approach of his artistic research on the symbolics of geometry, its relationship to logic, measure and harmony, and proceeded on the basis of an element, emblematic for him, the cell. Analysing the cell-like structure of the Cypro-syllabic and Cypro-Minoan script, the circular structure of the Neolithic settlement of Choirokoitia and of the rectangular structure of that of Engomi, he reveals to us their total relationship with the cellular structure of the modern electronic landscape.

In the specific work at UNESCO, the artist was inspired by the architectural circular structure of the archaeological settlement of Neolithic Choirokoitia. This archetypal cellular structure has survived unaltered through time and the artist encountered it in the electronic environment, where once again the cell is the main constituent element of creation. In the realisation of the work, he uses in symbolic vein, and in relief, primordial, diachronic materials such as earth, ochre and copper and iron oxide. The archetypal ideas, structures and materials are for the artist the thread which links him with the past. Discovering the past, he discovers himself at the same time as an infinitely small cell of the world on which co-exist layers of the past and the dynamics of the technological miracle of the present. Of a cell which has been blessed by the potential of using “logos” to shape the future.