The painter and printmaker Giorgos Ioannou was born in Athens in 1926 and passed away in 2017.
His teachers were Kostis Iliadis and Theodoros Drosos. He studied in Paris at the Académie Julian, in the studios of Claude Schurr and Édouard Georges Mac-Avoy. He traveled to major European art centers, including France, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, and Italy.
His work, initially containing Impressionist elements, moved during his mature phase into the realm of Pop Art and comic book aesthetics with a clear critical figuration. He is considered a core representative and pioneer of Pop Art in Greece. His subjects include landscapes, still lifes, interiors, as well as the human form. Using a highly characteristic personal idiom, sharp drafts-manship, flat colors, and a cinematic flow, he emphasizes the satire of social and political reality, creating compositions with a surrealist atmosphere and symbolic overtones.
He was also involved in printmaking, producing the “Album 1940-1974” with 100 monotypes inspired by the Greco-Italian War, the Axis Occupation, the Resistance, the Civil War, and the Military Dictatorship. He published theoretical texts on art in the daily and periodical Athenian press.
In 2012, he was honored by the Academy of Athens for his lifetime artistic contribution.
He held solo exhibitions in Athens, the Museum of Fine Arts of Ostend (1968, Pan-European Prize), the Isy Brachot Gallery in Brussels (1971, 1973, where he was a permanent associate), and the Pagani Gallery in Milan (1972), among others. He participated in group exhibitions, including the Panhellenic Exhibitions (1965, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1975), the Venice Biennale (1970), and Europalia in Brussels (1982). His works can be found in museums, art galleries, institutions, and private collections in Greece, Belgium, Italy, France, England, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere.