Police say that 5 bronze reliefs and two bronze sculptures value over 1,000,000 dollars had been saved from being melted down in a furnace after clueless thieves offered them as scrap metallic.
Police in Vienna stated that investigators had "succeeded in arresting two Romanian residents aged 37 and 41 within the Ottakring district on June 9, 2022 with the lively help of the duty power to fight road crime (EGS)."
They're suspected of getting stolen 5 bronze reliefs and two bronze sculptures from a studio within the Leopoldstadt space of the Austrian capital between Could 15 and 28, the police stated.
The artistic endeavors had been reportedly created by the well-known Greek-Austrian sculptor Joannis Avramidis (1922-2016).
The police stated: "Collectively, the objects are stated to have an artwork market worth of greater than $1.04 million (1 million euros) and weigh round [2,200 pounds]."
They had been nearly melted down in a furnace as scrap metallic, in response to the police, who added: "It's due to the intensive investigations by the criminalists that the objects weren't melted down.
"It was ascertained that the suspects had offered the artwork objects to a recycling firm for a metallic worth of some thousand euros and that they had been going to be melted down imminently."
The police stated that the artistic endeavors had now been returned to their rightful proprietor, who has not been named, whereas the 2 suspects, who stay unidentified and deny having dedicated the theft, had been taken into custody.
It was unclear on the time of writing if the suspects had been formally charged.
Broadly thought-about considered one of Austria's most essential sculptors, Joannis Avramidis was born in 1922 in Batumi, which was then a metropolis within the Soviet Union and is now in Georgia, to Pontic Greek mother and father.
He was conscripted by the Nazis in 1943 earlier than being deported to Vienna as a international employee.
After the tip of World Struggle II, he studied portray at Vienna's Academy of High-quality Arts earlier than finding out underneath the Austrian artist Fritz Wotruba.
He was a professor of sculpture at Vienna's Academy of High-quality Arts from 1965 till he retired in 1992. He died in 2016 on the age of 93, two years after the loss of life of his spouse, Annemarie Avramidis.
This story was offered to Newsweek by Zenger Information.
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