Torso of a young woman

Elias Dekoulakos was born in Athens in 1929. In 1956, he obtained a diploma in painting from the Athens School of Fine Arts and later studied under Spiros Papaloukas. From 1960 to 1968, he worked as a professor at the School of Decorative Arts of the Athens Technological Institute and later taught at his private Studio of Fine Arts. In 1982, he was appointed as a professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he remained until 1988 when he resigned due to disagreements with the school's conditions. In 1989, he was elected as an Honorary Professor. His early paintings from the 1960s were within the framework of abstract expressionism. However, driven by an inner need to comment on political and social reality, he transitioned into a form of harsh photorealism using an airbrush technique. In the late 1970s, he attempted to comment on the alienation of humans from technology. In the mid-1980s, he chose to express himself through more complex expressive means and turned to constructions, installations, and videos. In the final phase of his artistic career, he turned to landscape painting, creating a series of landscapes from Mani and Athens.