Yiannis Melanitis is a Greek conceptual artist, sculptor, painter, installation artist, digital artist, born in Athens in 1967. Melanitis holds degrees in Painting, Sculpture and a master's degree in Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. He is a PhD Fellow at NTUA, Athens School of Architecture. In 2016 he was elected as an Assistant Professor at the Sculpture Department of the Athens School of Fine Arts. Melanitis's work initiates from an intense conceptualisation on the strategies of contemporary art. His research focuses on the role of information on the arts considering "Information as the New Conceptualisation".. He derives from philosophy, epistemology and history of art critique to construct artworks from dissimilar analogue or digital techniques. His concepts refer to epistemology, science and philosophy, using "heterogeneous artistic media" and artistic practices. Among other artists, he has been analysing works of Marcel Duchamp, Iannis Xenakis, James Joyce, Ezra Pound. In 2016–2017 he presented at TTT Conference, Corfu, the Leda Melanitis transgenic butterfly, a new species containing his own gene. Leda Melanitis transgenic butterfly was exhibited at MACRO Museum of Contemporary Arts, Rome. He has published essays on art and philosophy in English and Greek. His texts are translated into English, Italian, Korean and Greek. His work has become a subject of criticism in international editions as "Art Tomorrow", Leonardo MIT, Lomonosov Moscow University, by Seung-Chol Shin, Mario Savini, A.Kaniari, Magdalena Lange and others. He was the organiser and one of the main exhibitors of an exhibition at the Andreas Syngros hospital in Athens with subject: Dermatographies, Art meets Medicine. He was selected by the hospital to coordinate the exhibition and showcase his art because of his involvement and experience in exhibiting images of the modern human body, bioart and medical illustrations.
Works and exhibitions
His latest works include the LEDA MELANITIS TRANSGENIC butterfly, , Museu D. Diogo de Sousa, Braga, Portugal, Hunter of Light/ Hermes tychomachos, Kryographia / Anatomy of Writing installation at Museu Nacional of Brasil, Hy-Brasil exhibition at , DE GEOMETRIE VAN RHETORIEK, at the Gallo Romeins Museum −2012, Belgium, the interactive performance installation and exhibition called Kryographia, which presents writing as a metaphor for absolute coldness, in Athens, 14 October 2010. An extended form of the work Kryographia was presented at Kryographia/ On the Way Towards Iceland, Megaron, Thessaloniki Concert Hall. Another conceptual exhibition was AN IMAGINARY MUSEUM OF AN IMAGINARY ARTIST /NAO ME TOQUE, Bibliothèque Nationale de Brasilia,. Dans Le Jardin d’ Epicure / Les elements comme des metaphors, a personal exhibition at the University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland, in March 2006. Also, Pleasure Machine which was performed at The Eighth New York Digital Salon in Madrid, and at the Blue Stage in the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Also Touch Terrain at the in Monaco, a multi-user interactive environment in 2006 and performance videos at Generative Arts, Milano, 2005. In March 2008, he installed a sculpture exhibition at E31 Gallery, Athens, called Odysseus as Faust. At Depo Darm gallery, Athens, he exhibited works referring to the "conceptualisation at a minimum point" of an artwork, introducing probability through "artistic-math equations". Texts about his work are written among others, by in several editions, by , by M. Digoni, Rea Thönges-Striggari, Prof Dr Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Edward Lucie-Smith, N. Adamou, and I. Maglinis. Melanitis exhibited at the first Bienale of Modern Art in Thessaloniki, organised by the State Museum of Modern Art of Greece. He was one of the artistic directors of an exhibition dedicated to Joseph Beuys in Greece. As an artist, Melanitis also exhibited his own art at the same exhibition. He exhibited his work at the Eugenides Foundation. He also exhibited at the second Performance Festival of Athens. Melanitis' works are also hosted in digital libraries in databases of visual art such as Gratin, and The Database of Virtual Art.
Arts writer
He wrote articles for the periodicals Artzine and Futura that have been published in both the English and Greek languages. Also his text on Bioart was published in Τέχνη, πολιτισμός, παγκοσμιοποίηση. Also at International Conference on Virtual Storytelling, ICVS, held in Avignon, France, in September 2001,,, editions Springer.
