Georgios Karagiannis

“I do not paint with colour. I reconstruct colour, movement, and light through thousands of fragments of paper.”

Georgios Karagiannis is a Greek artist whose practice brings together the discipline of stone craftsmanship, the sensitivity of classical music, and more than four decades of handmade collage. Throughout his life, he has moved between two contrasting yet equally demanding worlds: the physical strength and exactitude required to shape granite and Pentelic marble, and the delicate control of the classical guitar. He studied classical guitar under distinguished Greek teachers Dimitris Fampas, Gerasimos Miliaresis, and Dimitris Kakoullidis.

Over the past forty years, Karagiannis has developed a meticulous form of reconstructive micro-collage. Working under magnification, he hand-cuts and positions thousands of small fragments of paper sourced from magazines and newspapers. No paint is used: colour, tonal transitions, contours, movement, light, and texture are constructed entirely through paper.

His practice includes both original compositions and painstaking reconstructions of classical and historic masterpieces. In these works, Karagiannis does not simply reproduce an existing image. He carefully studies the original art...