World Artist Awards
Winner Exhibition

January 30th to February 5th, 2026
Open awards ceremony
January 30th (Fri)
at 4pm
Daecheong Gallery, Busan Catholic Center

IOANNIS KAISERLIS was born in 1974 in Veria in central Macedonia, and currently lives and works in Athens. As a teenager he begins to have a passion for painting and sculpture. The family business, linked to furnishings and interior design, allows the Greek author not to completely diverge his attentions from the artistic world, but rather stimulates him to find the right reconciliation between his pictorial talent and the interference professional. Over the years, Kaiserlis refined his preparation between studio activities and numerous trips to the most important museums in Europe, developing a language that brings him closer to American action expressionism hybridized with suffused figurative echoes, the latter attributable to the millenary aesthetic tradition of classical Greece. The production of Kaiserlis is open to all those innumerable declinations of informal art, which developed between Europe and the United States during the post-war period. His figurative repertoire proves to be extremely eclectic, capable of drawing liberally even from those surrealist roots which constituted, in turn, the foundations of the aforementioned informal movement. His figurative implantology is shaped around the study of the great masters that he had the opportunity to focus on during his training trips, focusing mainly on the figures of Joan Mirò and Jackson Pollock. Without neglecting the aspect based on his training linked to design, a multifaceted trait derives from it, within which stylistic elements apparently devoid of interrelation coexist within a language which, although it has been plurally adopted by his contemporaries, proves capable of reveal itself through him in an absolutely unique and unrepeatable way. Although Kaiserlis makes use of the wild gestures of the American leaders, his research always turns towards compositional euphony which allows him a material transfiguration of his very personal “calm chaos”, where the artist’s sensitivity is synthesized with the spatial harmony of the decorator. The result is therefore a painting rich in perfectly calibrated chromatic suggestions, aimed at generating sensations of lust rather than brutal dismay, thanks to a measured use of the spatula and dripping techniques tending not to attack the viewer’s visual field, but rather towards a multisensory ecstatic meditation of Kandinsky matrix. Designed more for the decoration of private homes rather than for the mosaic display, the works of Kaiserlis prove to be more lyrical declinations of the scenic space than an uncontrolled expression of one’s emotions. The structure of each scenography is harmonious and dynamic, demonstrating a proportional coexistence of shapes and colors even when it makes use of the dripped with greater entropic emphasis. Through a masterful commensuration of the expressive value of the pigments, ours captures the observer, immersing him in lively and hypnotic atmospheres with surrealist suggestions. In addition to various Pollocks and Gorkys, Ioannis Kaiserlis also owes much to Joan Mirò. From the Spanish master, ours recovers the carnivalesque suggestions of the colors and the sign imprint. Traditionally, surrealism approaches the multiform facets of the dreaming ego and the painting of Kaiserlis, although with expressionistic-abstract influences, is no exception. In his works the author transfers his dream material to the pictorial support in its essential state, often letting himself be guided by that pure psychic automatism, the way in which André Breton defined the creative process of the masters of surrealism, which leads him to search for a sort of alternate reality, a graphic emanation of his dreamy, transcendent worldview. Kaiserlis’ action painting does not allow itself to be overwhelmed solely by gestures, but rather indulges in manifest narrative voluptuousness. The Greek abstractionist proposes a painting which, despite the almost absence of subjects attributable to a unifying message, possesses an intrusive as well as variegated communicative emphasis. The triptych The Wave of the Venetian Life represents a heartfelt wish of hope to the lagoon city, whose millenary beauty coexists with the constant scourge of the storm surges. In the distribution of the dramatic architecture of the scene, one can venture interesting parallels with Picasso’s Guernica, a work with which he shares the harsh criticism of human intervention. If the cubist highlighted the disasters of war on a global scale, Ioannis Kaiserlis pictorially expresses himself on the uncontrolled depletion of environmental resources, focusing on the disastrous impact of man to the detriment of the delicate balance of the ecosystem. On the one hand the author regrets the daily deterioration of the city of Venice, on the other his work re-invokes the help of “Divine Providence”, that is, that plan of the Creator capable of directing all earthly activities, so that the universal balance is one day restored. The gondola lashed by the waves on the right side of the scene constitutes an interesting parallelism with the iconography of the cross, as an element of Christ’s passion. In The Wave of the Venetian Life the mystical spiritual subtext is recognizable which guides both the pictorial inspiration of the Kaiserlis, and in general the life of him as an individual.