Artist’s CV
Spyros Vassiliou was a Greek artist, one of the most productive, recognizable and popular Greek visual artists. Painter, icon painter, engraver, scenographer, graphic designer, decorator, writer-critic and teacher. His artistic production is characterized by the meeting of the teachings of popular and Byzantine art with the experimentation of his contemporary currents.
He was born in 1903 in Galaxidi. He studied in Athens with a scholarship, at the School of Fine Arts of the National Technical University of Athens, from 1921 to 1926, with Kaloudi and Lytra as teachers. He started presenting his works in exhibitions immediately after his graduation (in 1926 he exhibited in the foyer of the Municipal Theater of Athens together with Polykleitos Regos, Spyros Kokkino and Antonis Polykandriotis, in the so-called “Exhibition of the Four”). Vassiliou held his first solo exhibition in 1929 at Stratigopoulos Gallery.
In 1930 he won the Benakeio Prize of the Academy of Athens for the fresco designs of the church of Agios Dionysios of Areopagitos in Kolonaki. With the prize money, he made his first trip to Europe, where he had the opportunity to visit museums and collections. The canonization of Agios Dionysios took place between 1936 and 1939. He was a member of the artistic groups Techni and Stathmi and the Chamber of Visual Arts of Greece, he participated in international exhibitions, at the Venice Biennale (1934, 1964), in Alexandria in 1957 and in Sao Paulo in 1959 while his works were presented in Detroit in 1955 (on the occasion of the illustration of the church of Saint Constantine in Detroit) and in 1960 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (for his work “Lights and Shadows” in particular, he received the Guggenheim Award Greek section of AICA). Vassiliou’s works are in many public and private collections in Greece and abroad. The contents of the National Gallery-Museum of Alexandros Soutzos Archived 2014-04-14 at the Wayback Machine. his works represent the different decades of his work. At the National Gallery, Vassiliou held a retrospective exhibition in 1975 and presented a polythea based on his work in 1983. Spyros Vassiliou taught at the Papastrateio School and later at the Athenian Institute of Technology. He was a member of the Greek Chamber of Visual Arts (EETE).
Vassiliou moved along the axis of the request to return to the roots of Greek art, in order to meet trends of the European modernism movements, in the way they were recruited by the artistic life in Athens. His works, which depict the natural and urban landscape as well as scenes of social life, approach and describe everyday life with a lyrical and dreamy mood, combining the scholarly with the folk element and tradition with modernity. It is interesting how his painting captures the evolution of the Athenian landscape from the interwar period to the decades of counter-provision. His house under the Acropolis at number 5 Webster Street has been converted from 2004 to 2016 into a museum. It hosted works of the King from private collections, which were changed at regular intervals. The Atelier organized lectures, seminars, talks, musical evenings, educational programs, art workshops and also took care of the organization and digitization of the artist’s archive.
