100 YEARS FROM THE BIRTH OF YANNIS MORALIS

Yannis Moralis was a leading figure in 20th-century Greek art and a prominent representative of the “Generation of the Thirties”. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, initially attending the Sunday classes of Nikos Nikolaou while still in high school and later with Dimitrios Geraniotis, Konstantinos Parthenis, Oumvertos Argyros, Yannis Kefallinos, etc. as teachers. He spent three years in Paris, where he trained in painting, murals and mosaics. He taught at the Athens School of Fine Arts for 35 years, influencing generations of artists. Apart from paintings, his multifaceted oeuvre also includes engravings, sculpture, murals, ceramics, sets and costumes for theatre productions, book illustrations and record covers, as well as artwork integrated into architectural design. By successfully combining the classical with the modern, Moralis became one of the prime exponents of “Greek modernism”. However diverse his work may have been, ranging in subject-matter and style from realism to geometric abstraction, it remained fundamentally centred on man and the themes of love and death.