The sculptor Gerasimos Sklavos was born in Domata, Kefalonia, in 1927.
He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under M. Tombros (1950-1956). He continued his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the sculptors G.-H. Adam, M. Gimond, and H. Yencesse, and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under O. Zadkine.
He presented his work for the first time at Yvonne Zervos’s Cahiers d’Art gallery (1961), followed by numerous solo and group exhibitions, including, among others, the Biennale of Sculpture in Antwerp (1961), the São Paulo Biennial (1961), and the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris (1961, 1963), where he won the first prize.
Following his initial figurative sculptures, he turned towards abstraction towards the late 1950s. He worked primarily with marble as well as hard stones (granite, porphyry, sandstone), inventing his own technique for their processing called teleglyptique (tele-sculpting), which was based on the use of an oxy-acetylene flame (1960). He placed particular emphasis on the treatment of the stone surface and the interplay of light.
He was tragically killed in his Paris workshop in 1967, when he was crushed by his own sculpture, “The Friend Who Did Not Stay”.