The painter, printmaker, hagiographer, and scenographer Spyros Vassiliou was born in Galaxidi in 1903 and passed away in Athens in 1985.
He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1921–1926) under Alexandros Kaloudis and Nikolaos Lytras, from whom he learned the principles of modernism.
He left behind more than five thousand works (portraits, landscapes, still lifes, etc.) in almost every painting technique (oil, tempera, watercolor, fresco, etc.). His early works show the influence of Fauvism and Symbolism. During the Axis Occupation, he turned to printmaking, publishing a series of woodcuts in the literary magazine “Nea Estia”. In the post-war period, he utilized elements of tradition, collage, pop art, and photorealism, among others. From the 1960s onward, the faithful representation of his subjects was placed against monochromatic, surreal backgrounds, producing a dramatic effect. In his landscapes, he moved toward an abstract, poetic, and nostalgic rendering of space, often depicting the evolution of the Athenian urban landscape from the interwar period to the decades of the post-war building boom (antiparochi). As a representative of the Generation of the ’30s, he sought and pursued “Greekness,” fruitfully blending elements of Byzantine art and folk tradition with European modernism.He collaborated with newspapers and magazines.
He published and illustrated books, and designed more than 60 sets for theatrical productions of the National Theatre of Greece, the National Theatre of Northern Greece (NTNG), the Stuttgart Opera, as well as for feature films.
His work was presented in numerous solo exhibitions (Athens, Thessaloniki, Palermo, Zurich, etc.). He participated in group and international exhibitions, including the Panhellenic Art Exhibitions (1938, 1940, 1948, 1952, 1957, 1960, 1963, 1965, 1975), the Venice Biennale (1934, 1964), the Alexandria Biennale (1957), the São Paulo Art Biennial (1959), and the New Delhi Triennale (1971), among others.
In 1929, he was awarded the Benakeio Prize by the Academy of Athens for his fresco decoration of the Church of Saint Dionysios the Areopagite (completed 1936–1939).
In 1960, he received the Guggenheim Prize of the Greek section of AICA in New York for his artwork “Lights and Shadows”.
He was a member of the art groups “Techni” and “Stathmi,” as well as the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece.
In 2004, his house at 5 Webster Street, located just below the Acropolis, was converted into a museum.