Daniel Panagopoulos Known As Danil (1924-2008) In The Mirror

Daniel PANAGOPOULOS known as DANIL (1924-2008) In the mirror, 1955, gouache, 32 x 25 cm, dated 1955 lower left.
Provenance: Studio funds, Marseille Dard, May 10, 2022.

Danil Panagopoulos was born in 1924 in Pyrgos Ilias. He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts with Konstantinos Parthenis (1944-1947), abandoning his previous studies in medicine. In 1954, he went to Paris on a three-year scholarship, where he eventually settled permanently.
At first, he was influenced by gestural abstract painting, but soon he abstained from conventional artistic mediums and joined the nascent avant-garde movements of the time. During the 1960s, his art moved to three dimensions, using packaging cartons as his main material (Black Boxes). His research in this field was presented in his first solo exhibition in Paris (Gallery J, 1964). With similar works, he participated in the exhibition, Three Proposals for a New Greek Sculpture, (with Caniaris and Kessanlis), organized by Pierre Restany (as part of the parallel events of the Venice Biennale in 1964).
The disputes provoked by this exhibition in Greece revealed the important role that the generation of the 1960s would play in the renewal and modernization of Greek art. Then, after being critical of technology through his work Electric Boxes (with which he participated in the Avant-garde Griechenland exhibition in Germany in 1968), he returned to wall works. After 1972, his basic material became burlap, torn, colored or worn, as an investigation into the relationship between flat surfaces, space and light.
These works, which often reveal an affinity with the French Support-Surface art movement, also express the artist's spiritual research and his reflections on art and society. He has presented numerous solo exhibitions (some retrospectives), mainly in France and Greece. He has also participated in major group exhibitions and international fairs in various countries. He was a member of the Committee of the Salon des Comparaisons in Paris for decades.
He has published critical essays and three books: Pratique et pensée de la peinture (1973), Chiaroscuro A (1982) and Selections from the Journal 1973-1985 (1987).
In 1998, the retrospective exhibition Danil, 1950-1997 was organized at the National Gallery of Art in Athens. He spent the last years of his life in isolation in Pyrgos. He donated a large part of his work to the National Art Gallery in Athens a year before his death (Pyrgos, 2008).