Nausica Pastra

Nausica Pastra (1921–2011), one of the most significant Greek visual artists, was born in Kalamata and lived and worked in Paris, Athens, and Thessaloniki. She studied sculpture at the Sommerakademie in Salzburg (1957) and at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna (1957–1962), and later pursued Sociology of Art at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris (1967–1973). Beginning with human-centered works, Pastra gradually moved toward abstraction. By the late 1960s, she had developed a personal language in which mathematical relations and experiments with geometric forms played a central role. In 1971, the French state awarded her a patent for “Synectron,” a new dynamic two-dimensional form produced through the combination of the circle and the square. Over time, reaching a peak in the 1990s, her work incorporated the third dimension, and her sculpture articulated the material presence of things in space and time with particular force. In 1963, she held her first solo exhibition at Galerie Würthle in Vienna, followed by twenty solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad (Austria, France, Italy, and the Netherlands). She also participated in group exhibitions, including the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture in Paris (1973), the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Düsseldorf (1973), Europalia in Antwerp (1982), the Alexandria Biennale (1982), and the Greek National Gallery (1992).