A series of eight etchings by Panayiotis Kalorkoti, published by the artist 1984, in an edition of 50.

Panayiotis Kalorkoti says about his work:

"My work draws on a diverse range of histories - that of art, of politics and of my personal ideas. The result is an art which is often fragmentary and which brings together imagery culled from heterogeneous sources - graffiti, street art, comics, the great caricaturists of the past (Hogarth, Kay etc.), and modern masters such as Matisse and Picasso. The results are inevitably humerous and ironic as is the work of the artists I admire most and the impression gained is of a commentary on contemporary society - sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic-comic. The device which I employ to shape my ideas is that of contrast of one image with another and this is reinforced formally by an unusual and vivid colour sense. The feeling of cultural references thrown into a melting pot conveys a vivid sense of the dislocations of modern life.

My work is frequently produced in series and included is a detailed description of eight related prints on the theme of the fathers of contemporary art.

In this sequence of prints, I have used a personal selection of eight figures who might well stand as the Fathers of Modern Art in order to explore the interlocking patterns of personality, surroundings, influences and friends which have coloured the output of each. The choice is idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive or encyclopaedic, yet no detail has been included at random, so that my researches have here constituted an intrinsic part of the image-making process. The result is not, however, art-history or biological illustration, but rather an act of homage conceived in visual terms. Such homage inevitably reflects the giver as well as the receiver, and in these prints the stylistic and technical decisions of my own art have fused with the details borrowed from the lives of my subjects to indicate the dynamics of continuing influence and the value of myth-making and role-playing. Through these images I can stand at the feet of my chosen Pantheon, worshipping but also enquiring, fired by the mundane as by the sublime and slightly bemused to find myself reconstituting their images from my own viewpoint."

Text supplied by the Artist