Vasso Katraki is awarded a prize at the International Engraving Biennial of Lugano

After the war, engraver VassoKatraki (1914-1988) chose the common people (mothers with children and fishers) as the subject of her work, which she portrayed using simple forms and bold lines. Her morphology changed when she chose a new medium for her art, stone. She wrote in 1966: “While experimenting with engraving on traditional materials like wood or copper, I felt that my expressive voice was being limited. In my wanderings, I discovered a material that would fulfill my artistic needs, sandstone.”

The use of stone opened up new horizons for Katraki: minimalist shapes replaced her intricate and detailed themes, referencing to Cycladic art and black figures on white spaces or non-spaces. Thanks to those compositions she was awarded a prize in the Engraving Biennial of Lugano in 1958 and, in the same year, the 1st prize at the Alexandria Biennial. Her international awards were testimonies to the flourishing of engraving as an art in modern Greece.