Sons of Opy Zouni root out fakes attributed to their artist mom
Yannis Zounis had learned to identify his mother’s works. He didn’t only have a detailed photographic archive she had left him and his brother to consult. Whenever Opy Zouni, the famed Greek artist, finished a painting or other creation, she would show it to her family first. “Look at it,” she would tell them. “Because one day you will have to identify them.” The experienced eyes of her two sons, Yannis and Petros, traveled through her geometric compositions and could identify her style every time.
In late November, however, a work appeared at auction that aroused their suspicions. It resembled an older acquisition from the collection of a major institution. It seemed odd to them that it was for sale. They saw it up close and realized that something was wrong. “My mother played with perspective in her work. In the fake, the eye doesn’t travel,” Yannis Zounis told Kathimerini. A few days later, the two brothers discovered that a gallery was exhibiting another work attributed to their mother. It too had issues. The dimensions were not correct. “Our mother was a perfectionist, she chose certain dimensions for her works,” Yannis Zounis said.
‘My mother played with perspective in her work. In the fake, the eye doesn’t travel’
The signature
It turned out that the two cases had something in common. The auction house and the gallery had purchased the works from the same person. As Yannis Zounis describes it, an 80-year-old gallery owner showed up at their father’s house last summer. He presumably showed him a genuine work by Opy Zouni and asked him to sign a piece of paper attesting to its authenticity, as well as the back of a picture frame in red marker. His father’s signature, however, later appeared on other artworks. The artist’s sons say their 87-year-old father’s signature was fraudulently obtained and reproduced by the forgers. They appealed to police authorities, and on January 30 it was announced that the 80-year-old gallery owner had been arrested by the Department of Cultural Heritage and Antiquities of the Attica Security Directorate. He faces charges of fraud and forgery, as well as violation of the law on antiquities, as ancient items and Byzantine icons were found in his possession.
Yannis Zounis says that in the past they had also dealt with cases of works allegedly created by his mother. Opy Zouni died in 2008 after a long battle with cancer. She was one of the greatest exponents of geometric abstraction. However, forgeries began to appear a few years after her death and with greater frequency after a retrospective exhibition at the Benaki Museum in 2016, which was an occasion to discuss her work and her contribution to the art world once again.
Usually, the Zounis brothers would discover the forgeries at auctions and the works would be withdrawn after their intervention. They had not previously contacted the authorities because they could not determine who the supplier was. But this time they were surprised by the actions of this gallery owner. They even discovered that he was in possession of original works, one of which had been given to him by their mother years previously.
This is the third case of forged art that the Hellenic Police have solved in the last three months. In one of them, the perpetrators tried to sell four fake Picasso paintings and a Pollock to an undercover police officer for 4.4 million euros. At the same time, they were negotiating the sale of an alleged sketchbook of drawings by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky that they claimed to have stored in a Swiss safe-deposit box. The common element in all three cases was old age and the long and uninterrupted activity of the people involved.
Yannis Zounis notes that it is possible that other forged works by his mother are in circulation, but he hopes that his family’s efforts will bring the traffickers to justice. “It’s a way for them to understand that next time we’re not going to ignore this,” he says.
