The sculptor Gabriella Simossi was born in Pyrgos, Elis, in 1926 and passed away in Paris in 1999.
She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under M. Tombros. She continued her studies in Paris at the École des Arts Décoratifs and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Ossip Zadkine (1955-1957).
In 1954, she settled permanently in Paris with her husband, the painter Yiannis Gaitis.
She distinguished herself in Ravenna in 1972, winning the Morgan’s Paint Premio, and in 1992, she was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government.
She presented her work in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad (Panhellenic Art Exhibitions, Biennials, Foire Internationale, among others), while after her death, a retrospective exhibition of her work was organized at the Couvent des Cordeliers in Paris. Her works were also featured at the Teloglion Foundation of Art as part of the exhibition “Voula Masoura and her world” in 2015-2016.
She moved between abstraction and dreamlike surrealism, utilizing a thematic vocabulary of symbolic hints and enigmatic connotations. The central theme in her work is the human figure (mainly female forms, often silenced, in isolation or silence, attempting to capture the deep, internal dimension of female subjectivity within contexts of entrapment), but she also worked on animal forms and hybrid imaginary creatures.