Giorgios Rigas (1921-2014)
“When it comes to painting quantities, whether of rooftiles, bricks, cobblestones, tobacco plants, floorboards, sheep, bunches of grapes or people, Giorgos Rigas’ approach blooms into an obsession with statistical values. He is incapable of painting ‘a lot’ – the amount must remain countable. This is a special credo in his artistic creations.”
— Becker, Wolfgang, “Reflections on the Works of Giorgos Rigas”
Neue Galerie – Sammlung Ludwig Aachen, 3.11.1988 – 8.1.1989
Giorgos Rigas, The Wedding Carriage, 1989, oil on linen, 33 × 48.5 inches
Giorgos Rigas was a Greek self-taught painter and outsider artist who lived and worked in Athens for most of his life. A laborer by trade, he painted from memory, returning to the mountain villages, seascapes, traditional life, labor, and communal rituals of his childhood.
His paintings are marked by elevated viewpoints, asymmetrical balance, and densely repeated details. Rather than using naturalistic perspective, Rigas reconstructed place through rhythm, pattern, and accumulation, creating compositions that feel both carefully ordered and deeply remembered.
His work was presented in From Memory: Giorgios Rigas at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, an exhibition sponsored by C. Grimaldis Gallery, and has also been shown by the gallery at the 2022 Outsider Art Fair and in its summer exhibitions.