The Romantic Anonymous Fellowship
The Romantic Anonymous Fellowship is a group of Stuckist painters founded in Athens in September 2004 by Odysseus Yakoumakis - the first, and so far only, Greek affiliate of Stuckism International. Yakoumakis, a painter and illustrator, conceived it as a Greek answer to what he calls the provincialism and imported postmodernism of the local art scene, and named his program 'Romantic Stuckism': figurative, symbolically charged painting in which each artist pursues a genuinely personal vision rather than polemic alone. Membership is international - early fellows included the London painter Ian J. Burkett, founder of the Ealing Stuckists, the Canadian painter-etcher Ilania Abileah, and ANTHE from the United States. In May 2010 the Fellowship staged Under the Cover of Romantic Anonymity at the Ash-In-Art Gallery in Athens, the first Stuckist exhibition in Greece.
Defining characteristics
- Figurative, representational painting made in deliberate opposition to postmodernist abstraction and conceptual art
- Mythological and personal symbolism drawn from what Yakoumakis calls the ancient traditions of the Earth
- Human-centered (anthropocentric) subject matter at the core of the picture
- Mixed stylistic inheritance: Renaissance and Northern-primitive precision, East Asian ink technique, expressionist and surrealist elements
- Satirical, moralizing content aimed at lifestyle culture, technology, and anti-art
Key figures
- Odysseus Yakoumakis (b. 1956) — Athens painter and writer who founded the Fellowship and theorized 'Romantic Stuckism'
- Ian J. Burkett — London painter, founder of the Ealing Stuckists and the Fellowship's first fellow
- Ilania Abileah — Canadian painter and etcher among the group's earliest members
Sources
- The Romantic Anonymous Fellowship - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- Odysseus Yakoumakis - Wikipedia encyclopedia