The heart

Nikos Kessanlis was born in 1930 in Thessaloniki. He studied under G. Spyropoulos and N. Nikolaou (1944-48) and studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1950-55, with G. Moralis). On a scholarship from the Italian Institute of Athens, he studied at the School of Conservation of Works of Art in Rome (1955-59), while attending courses in mural painting and engraving at the Scuola delle Arti Ornamentali di San Giacomo. In the 1950s he moved within the framework of art informel and abstract expressionism, while in the 1960s he was ideologically close to the New Realists and pioneered, together with his French peers, the creation of mec-art. He returned to Greece in 1980 as a professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts, served as rector from 1991-1995, and took the lead in moving the School's laboratories to the Pireos Street complex, a fact which is an active testimony to his social interest in visual art issues in Greece. The structure of the image, the importance of gesture, the issue of multiple reproduction and the involvement of the viewer in the final result have consistently been the axes of his course. He has had more than thirty solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad, including a major retrospective of his work at the MMST in 1997. Numerous are his participations in group exhibitions and international events. He represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 1988. In 2000 he created the work Tail for the Metro Station in Omonia (Athens). The artist was awarded the Modigliani Prize (1959), an honorary mention at the Sao Paulo Biennale (1961), the Premio Lissone and the first prize at the Salon de Montrouge (1997). He died in Athens in 2004.