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Tassos Mantzavinos was born in 1958 in Athens. In 1984 he graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts. In the same year he presented his first solo exhibition of his works, followed by more than forty exhibitions in various cities in Greece, Brussels and Paris. He has also participated in group exhibitions and international events such as the 2nd and 3rd Biennale of Young Artists of the European Mediterranean (Thessaloniki 1986, Barcelona 1987 respectively), the 16th Biennale of Alexandria (1987), the Vlasis Frissiras Collection (Thessaloniki 1994), etc. He has illustrated books, and from 1986 to 2000 he taught free drawing at the Vakalo School. The early paintings were extremely dense: with gradations of colour and intense compositional exploration they conveyed the depth of the subjects, realising a clearly existential quest. From the mid-1990s onwards he abandoned the chromatic asceticism and additionally introduced more explicit iconography. His figurative painting, which displays a high degree of stylistic freedom - colour tensions, anti-figurative design, etc. - manifests the same concerns, but also his narrative tendency. The frequent presence of the same motif in his works suggests the artist's identification with them, while at the same time certain themes acquire a surrealistic dimension as they appear in idiosyncratic depictions. His most recent works, three-dimensional wooden constructions function as an extension of his painting, enhancing its communicative immediacy.