Untitled
April 30, 2017
Aris Koutroulis was a cornerstone at Wayne State University in the '60s and '70s when he served as a professor in the printmaking department. He was known for his kind, gentle manner and his ability to make students comfortable enough to challenge their own ideas of art and their personal art making processes. His legacy lived beyond him through his students, such as Jim Chatelain, James Crawford, and Nancy Pletos.
Koutroulis was born in Piraeus, Greece, where he experienced a very tumultuous childhood during World War l. In an oral interview with the Smithsonian, Koutroulis cited to living through many bombings and coming close to death as a child because of starvation. For Koutroulis, the trauma of his childhood stayed with him as he forged a life as a U.S. citizen and an artist in Detroit. He earned his masters in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art, before moving on to be an instructor at Wayne State.
Untitled, is a very delicate print done on off white paper with black and brown ink. Koutroulis's main exploration as an artist was line work - through the course of his career, he explored how manipulating lines created a broader context for color, and abstract compositions. It's done with a printmaking technique called Chine Colle, where an image is printed on to a surface that's bonded to a heavier support during the printing process. This allows the printer to make work on more delicate surfaces, such as Japanese paper or linen. Here his line work is very minimal, which lets the texture of the paper, the color of the piece, and the gesture speak clearly on its own.
Text by Emily Lane Borden