A School of Visual and Applied Arts graduate of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Stratis Tavlaridis creates perforated artwork by hand out of thin Asian paper using paper-cutting techniques. With surgical precision, he puts his scalpel to use to produce ethereal works small and large, including large-scale installations that fill up exhibition spaces.

Born in the 1990s in Nea Malgara, a village outside Thessaloniki, he discovered his innate talent for painting at an early age – and was lucky enough to have a teacher encourage and cultivate it. As Stratis remembers, “This was my first ‘key.’ It boosted my self-confidence and suddenly gave me an important role within the microcosm of the class.” What followed seemed almost predestined, first taking him to the Technical Lykeion of Graphic Applications and then to AUTh’s Faculty of Fine Arts, where he advanced his aesthetic criteria and worked on the themes that inspired him the most. It is with great gratitude that he remembers, in these first few years, meeting lauded Greek artist Nikos Alexiou, “a great teacher of the art with immense dedication, consistency, and diligence in his work – values he imparted to me with tremendous generosity, which I observe to this day.”

Although he belongs to the generation whose entrance into the job market was clouded by the financial crisis and capital controls, Stratis Tavlaridis used his unique art style and masterful technique to stand out in a particularly demanding medium – paper cutting. As he says, characteristically, “To be true to your work, you need to be organized, consistent, prepared, disciplined. The economy, the culture, even human values may be in crisis today but I am glad that even in the most difficult periods of my life I have been fortunate enough to turn to art as a way out, as well as therapy.”