Nikos Kessanlis

While in Rome, he began to create the Walls series.

The pictorial space is formed by successive layers of thick paint, of letters, erasures and violent gestures.

The Walls were compositions of multiple layers of dense matière and non-art material inspired by the movement "art informel".

Kessanlis settled in Paris in 1961 were he associated with the group of artists under the name “New Realists” and the critic Pierre Restany.

In the works grouped under the title Gestures (1960-1962) Kessanlis appropriates scraps of urban and industrial environment, industrial objects and rubbish like clothes, plaster sacks, crumpled paper and parts of machinery.

Kessanlis presented for the first time the works from the Gestures series in 1961 at the exhibition New Adventures of the Object, curated by Pierre Restany at the J gallery in Paris.