Biography
Nikos Nikolaou was a distinguished painter, printmaker, and sculptor of Greece’s “Generation of the ’30s.” Beginning in 1929 he studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts with Konstantinos Parthenis and Oumbertos Argyros. There he met fellow student Yannis Moralis, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship and artistic dialogue. He first showed work in 1932 in the School’s student exhibition and, in 1935, joined the “Free Artists” group at Parnassos Hall. In 1937, together with Moralis, he left on a scholarship for further study in Rome and Paris, but the outbreak of World War II forced him to interrupt his studies and return to Athens. After the war he devoted himself exclusively to painting. He held his first solo show in 1947 (Rombos Gallery, Athens) and co-founded the artists’ group Armos in 1949, participating actively in its exhibitions. His work gained broad recognition: Nikolaou represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 1936 and again in 1964, and at the São Paulo Bienal in 1957. Over the following decades he presented ten solo exhibitions and took part in dozens of group shows, becoming a leading figure in postwar Greek art. In 1958 he also founded the Club of Art Lovers and Artists, within which the Armos art gallery operated in Kolonaki.
Alongside painting, Nikolaou worked impressively across other fields. He created large-scale frescoes for public buildings (including Panteion), and designed sets and costumes in collaboration with Karolos Koun’s Theatre of Art, Rallou Manou’s Hellenic Choreodrama, the National Theatre of Greece, the National Theatre of Northern Greece (NTNG), and others. He illustrated magazines and books—contributing regularly to the literary journal Nea Estia—and pursued the applied arts, producing ceramics, tapestries, and record-sleeve artwork. In 1964 he was elected Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he taught for a decade (also serving as director during the dictatorship). That same year he settled with his wife Angela Zouboulaki on the island of Aegina, making their home a regular gathering place for artists and intellectuals.
At the core of his work stands the female figure. From early on Nikolaou focused on the female nude, rendered with monumental masses, little or no perspective, and often composed in dialogue with three emblematic trees of the Greek landscape—the fig, olive, and pomegranate. His style favors economy of form and a restrained palette, reflecting a brief engagement with abstraction. A serious student of ancient art, he published theoretical studies on harmonic proportions and the genesis of the Archaic kouros. Accordingly, his painting fuses modern, expressionist energy with classical references: the nudes and portraits, especially, combine a contemporary sensibility with elements drawn from ancient Greek and Egyptian art, vase painting, and the Fayum portraits. Equally spare and expressive are his landscapes and small-scale still lifes. In the 1970s he even experimented with new supports, painting—very much in his own manner—on sea pebbles. He also worked occasionally in sculpture, the least known facet of his output.
Nikolaou remained artistically active almost to the end of his life. He died in Athens in 1986, shortly after publishing his only book, The Adventure of the Line in Art, a record of his aesthetic experiences and inquiries. Posthumously, his work has been honored through major retrospectives—at the National Gallery of Greece (1991) and the Benaki Museum (2005), among others—while his personal archive was donated to the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece (MIET) by the Nikos & Angela Nikolaou Foundation, preserving thousands of drawings and documents. As teacher and artist, Nikolaou left a distinctive mark on modern Greek art, creatively bridging modern aesthetics and classical tradition and influencing subsequent generations.
Selected Bibliography
- P. D. Kangelaris, Explorations in Contemporary Greek Painting — The Kangelaris Collection, vol. 1, Athens, 1991.
- Olga Mentzafou-Polyzou (ed.), Nikolaou, Adam Editions, Athens, 1998.
- Nikos Nikolaou, exhibition catalogue, Benaki Museum, Athens, 2005.
- Contemporary Greek Painting from the Kangelaris Collection, exhibition catalogue, Alexandria, 1992.
- Nikos Nikolaou: Drawings 1929–1986, MIET, Athens, 2017.
This biography was created with the assistance of AI.