The visual artist Manolis Giannadakis was born in Athens in 1954. He lives and works in Thessaloniki.
He studied at the School of Graphic Arts of the Athens Technological Organization – ATO (Doxiadis School) from 1972 to 1975, and at the Printmaking Studio of Kostas Grammatopoulos at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 1975 to 1980, where he combined his previous knowledge from the Doxiadis School with printmaking techniques.
At the Department of Visual and Applied Arts of the School of Fine Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), he taught Drawing from 1986 to 1997, and Printmaking from 1997 to 2022, advancing through all academic ranks (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor). He became a Professor Emeritus of AUTh in 2023.
He is a member of the Association of Visual Artists of Northern Greece (S.E.K.B.E.) and the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece (E.E.T.E.).
His rich artistic body of work combines drawing, painting, and printmaking through a research-oriented, experimental, and formative approach. The central theme that occupies his work is the relationship between “man and space.”
He has organized numerous solo exhibitions, with his first in 1984 in Athens featuring paintings and drawings at the Athens Art Gallery, and his most recent in 2023 in Thessaloniki, titled “I Was There”. He has also participated in a vast number of group exhibitions in Greece (Athens, Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Larissa, etc.) and abroad (Luxembourg, Košice, Valencia, Schwetzingen, Chamalières, Stockholm, London, Alexandria, etc.).
His artworks are held in private collections, municipal galleries, cultural institutions, and museums both in Greece and internationally.