The piano

Cosmas Xenakis was born in 1925 in Vraila, Romania, and studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens (1942-48) and painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1942-43). He continued his studies, with a scholarship from the French government, at the C.S.T.B. (1955-56) in Paris, where he studied the materials and techniques of building. In the period 1970-1971, on a Ford Foundation scholarship, he was able to work freely on his artistic creation. Alongside painting, he also took up sculpture, mainly creating reliefs for architectural ensembles. He also worked as a set designer and produced works for musical events, carried out architectural and urban planning studies and published texts on urban, artistic and environmental issues. His early works move within the framework of figurative art, and cover a wide range of subjects: portraits, interiors, nudes, and scenes of ethnographic, allegorical and mythological scenes. The paintings are characterised by a strictly organised composition, while the influence of French Fauvism is discernible. In the process, his works move towards more abstract tendencies, creating compositions characterized by rich colors, moving volumes and tectonic organization. His sculptural compositions, both sculptural and relief, exploit in turn the geometric vocabulary and the expressive potential of the materials, while very often he intervenes chromatically on the surfaces of his reliefs. He died in 1984 in Athens.