The painter and sculptor Ioannis (Wolfgang) Kardamatis was born in Charlottenburg, Germany, in 1916 and passed away in Avignon, France, in 2009. Born into a wealthy family to a Greek physician father from the island of Andros and a German mother, he grew up in Athens and Australia, and went on to live in Hydra, Venice, Germany, and Paris.
He studied at the National Art School in Sydney (1936–1939), in Paris under André Lhote (1946–1949), and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, the city where he resided from 1951 to 1967. He traveled extensively throughout Greece, Europe (primarily Italy), Egypt, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Asia, where he studied under the Buddhist monk Ladakh Le.
Mixed media techniques are prominently featured in his oeuvre. Inspired by Mycenaean gold artifacts, Byzantine mosaics, and Buddha statues in the Buddhist temples of Burma, Tibet, India, and Thailand, he adopted the practice of overlaying his works with gold leaf—a gilding technique he learned from local craftsmen in Venice. His artistic proposals reveal strong echoes of Byzantine art and Renaissance painting, often drawing on themes from ancient Greek mythology.
In 1957, alongside his friend and fellow painter Timothy Hennessy, whom he had met in Paris, he chose the Greek island of Hydra to establish their shared workshop. The two artists were uniquely bonded by their Eastern influences, an appreciation for Byzantium, and an admiration for the ancient Greek ideal, frequently holding joint exhibitions (such as in Athens in 1963).
He presented his work at the galleries of Alexander Iolas (Geneva 1967 and New York), with whom he shared a deep, lifelong friendship, as well as through Iolas’s partner galleries in Athens (Zouboulakis Gallery 1977, Artio Gallery 1986). He also held solo exhibitions in Milan (Galleria del Naviglio 1961), Venice (Galleria d’Arte ‘Il Canale’ 1961), and Athens (Artio Gallery 1993, 1999), alongside group exhibitions in Paris, Athens, Hydra, Spetses and elsewhere.
His works are held in prestigious private collections across Greece, Italy, France, Germany, England, Lebanon, the United States, Mexico, and Australia.