Biography
Vassilis Lambrinos (1926–2017) was born in Suez, Egypt, to Greek parents—part of the wider Greek diaspora. As a young man he moved to Europe to study and pursued a wide range of artistic interests: painting, theatre, and dance in Athens, Paris, London, and Monte-Carlo. In the mid-1950s he settled in Buenos Aires, where he built a distinguished career in the performing arts. There he both directed and acted in Argentine films and served as ballet director at the Teatro Colón. His stage work ranged from the ancient Bacchae to Nikos Kazantzakis’s Kouros, and he founded his own dance company, touring Latin America for a decade. As a choreographer, he contributed to Colón productions—among them Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé—and also worked as an artistic director for Argentine television. His performance in Los Tallos Amargos (1956) earned him Best Actor from Argentina’s National Film Institute, confirming his stature on screen.
By the late 1950s Lambrinos emigrated to the United States, extending his work across film and television. Based in New York and Los Angeles, he appeared in international productions, including Hollywood titles such as The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964) and The Female Animal (1970), and in the Greek film Η Επιστροφή της Μήδειας (The Return of Medea, 1968). Alongside stage and screen, he steadily developed his visual art. From the 1960s he devoted increasing energy to painting, and by the early 1970s he had established a distinct personal style. Working chiefly in oil on canvas, he returned again and again to his birthplace in spirit—seascapes animated by the Aegean: quicksilver light, shifting color, and the changing moods of the Mediterranean. The canvases marry clear-eyed realism with an idealizing nostalgia for the Greek sea, and found a ready audience among international collectors.
From the late 1970s onward, Lambrinos exhibited widely, gaining broad recognition. He showed in group exhibitions and mounted significant solo shows in Greece and abroad. Highlights include Hammer Galleries, New York (1972) and a California cycle culminating in the Palm Springs Desert Museum (1976); in Athens, landmark solos at the historic Zygos Gallery (1980, 1985) introduced his work directly to Greek audiences—now as a distinguished artist of the diaspora. His paintings entered public collections worldwide: in Greece, the Vorres Museum; in the U.S., the Butler Institute of American Art (Ohio), the Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield (Massachusetts), the University of Wyoming Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery (UNC Greensboro), and the Parrish Art Museum (New York), among others.
As a Greek artist of the diaspora, Lambrinos bridged cultures and artforms—stage, screen, and canvas. Though he spent most of his life abroad, he kept strong ties to his Greek identity, visible in the themes of his painting. Through seascapes and the language of Greek light, he brought the beauty of his homeland to international audiences, contributing to the global visibility of modern Greek art and landscape. He died in New York on May 12, 2017, aged 91, leaving a multifaceted legacy as a cosmopolitan creator who honored his heritage while making his mark on the international art scene.
Bibliography
- Zygos Gallery — “Vassili Lambrinos (1926–2017),” biographical note (gallery website).
- Lotus Gallery (Athens) — presentation of the painting Anemodis with artist biography (website).
- The New York Times, “Vassili Lambrinos Obituary,” June 4, 2017.
- ISET – Institute of Contemporary Greek Art — Exhibition Archive: Vassilis Lambrinos, Zygos Gallery, Athens 1985.
- The Desert Sun (Palm Springs), “Artist captures images of Aegean Sea,” Feb 12, 1987.
This biography was created with the assistance of AI.