Artist’s CV
Panagiotis Tetsis was born in Hydra in 1925 and settled with his family in Piraeus in 1937. However, he returned every summer to Hydra, where he began to paint. There he met Hatzikyriakos-Ghikas and Pikionis, whom he considers, indirectly, his teachers.
In 1940, he took his first painting lessons from the German Klaus Frieslander and then studied at the ASKT in Athens (1943-1949). A year before graduating, he held his first solo exhibition (1948, Rhombos). In 1951, he also began his teaching activity, as a curator in the chair of free design at NTUA, with professor Hatzikyriakos-Ghikas.
With an IKY scholarship, he continues his studies in Paris (1953-56) where, among other things, he attends copper engraving courses with Ed. Goerg at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Returning to Greece, he settled in Athens, where he works until today, dividing his free time in Sifnos and Hydra.
The subjects he studied in Paris (Sfahta, Plystres, Football, etc.) were presented in Athens (1958, Zygos), in an exhibition that was a milestone in his career. His painting showed from the beginning that he assimilated elements of modernism and abstraction, but remained figurative. Since then, his thematic choices, from multifaceted, large-scale compositions to Portraits of friends, Seas and Still Lifes, function as occasions, aiming to highlight purely painterly values.
In his long career, he used the synthetic, color and expressive possibilities of oil painting, but also of pastel, watercolor and ink. Throughout his work, light determines the structure of the composition as an integral component of color, even in his black and white works, especially in his copper engravings, with their rich tones of black.
He taught at the Department of Designers of the Athenian Technological Club (1959-1962) and was a co-founder and teacher of the Free School of Fine Arts (Vakalos School) – together with Eleni Vakalos, Asadour Baharian and Frantzis Fratzeskakis – (1958-1976). He was elected professor at ASKT of Athens (1976), where he taught until 1991 (rector from 1989). In 1993 he became a regular member of the Athens Academy and in 1999 he was honored with the Superior Order of the Phoenix.
He had and has intense exhibition activity: more than 90 individual exhibitions and many group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. He participated in the Biennale of Sao Paulo (1957) and the Biennale of Alexandria (1959). His retrospective exhibition entitled 35 years of painting (1992, Pieridis Gallery), toured the municipal galleries of Mytilene, Patras, Kalamata, Rhodes and Chania.
Other retrospective exhibitions followed at the National Gallery (1999), in Florence, Cyprus and elsewhere. He has published 4 books of his texts and has published articles in the press.
