(b Athens, 1903). Greek sculptor. He studied sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, in Paris with the French sculptor Marcel Gimond (b 1894), and in Italy. His work first began to attract attention in 1937, when he designed the war memorial at Piraeus. His monumental work was still traditional in style in the mid-1950s, when he designed the monument to The Fallen (h. 3 m, 1956) in the Athens suburb of Nikaia. This is an austere composition, inspired by the 'Rondanini' Piet? of Michelangelo and Etruscan bronzes. His figurative sculpture bordered on abstraction in the imposing stone composition of the Zalonga monument (12.5*17.6 m, 1954-61) in Epiros, which rises up at the mouth of an abyss and is visible from miles around. It depicts the dance of the heroines of the Greek War of Independence. Zongolopoulos finally turned to a joyful, uplifting abstraction in 1958 and thereafter worked almost exclusively in metal. A frequently used technique was to weld together bronze sheets of various shapes and sizes and to organize them into compositions that played with light and shade and that had a rhythmic interplay between voids and fullnesses. This is vividly shown in the monumental, abstract composition (h. 18 m) that was erected in 1966 on the Trade Fair ground at Thessaloniki, and which was inspired by the Nike of Samothrace. In the 1970s Zongolopoulos turned to optico-kinetic sculpture. His airy, sculptured 'machines' used a variety of objects, such as springs and lenses, to excite all the senses through movement, rhythm and sound. After 1977 his optico-kinetic sculpture was enriched by using water, as in the water-mobile sculpture that he designed in 1981 for a fountain in Klavthmonos Square, Athens. In 1984 he won a competition to design a monument of National Resistance at Gorgopotamos with a huge transparent spherical work, 16 m in diameter, made up of horizontal and vertical stainless steel tubes with five metal simantra at their core. In 1993 he represented Greece in the 45th Venice Biennale.
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