Xenakis Constantine

The international contemporary painter of the Greek Diaspora was born in 1931 in Cairo, where he took his first steps in his art. He studied in Paris (1956-1961), architecture and interior design, and painting.

His first solo exhibition was in Sweden (1969, Sôdertalje Konsthal). He presented his first solo exhibition in Greece in 1971, during the dictatorship of the colonels, at the Goethe Institute, which resulted in acting as a bold intervention on an artistic and political level.

The work of Konstantinos Xenakis is in dialogue with the cultural past, his personal poetic semiology borrows elements from modern life, but also from writing systems of ancient cultures.

Already before the end of the 1960s he had begun to deal with the pre-eminent characteristic theme of his mature work: codes, signs and symbols that convey messages and define ways of communication. The world of hieroglyphics, the Phoenician and Greek alphabets as well as the Japanese and Latin form its personal expressive language.

Xenakis taught in Berlin and Paris, where he settled in 1973. From the mid-1990s his visits to Greece intensified and, gradually, he began to divide his time between Paris and Athens.

In 1996, honoring his Egyptian origin, he presented a retrospective exhibition in Alexandria and Cairo entitled The Return of the Artist, 1958-1996.

In our country he exhibits in three parts the autobiographical series entitled The Book of Life (1995, 1997, 2003), while in 2003 there is a retrospective presentation of his works of the last twenty years (K.M.S.T., Thessaloniki). Two monographs on his work have been published in Greek, in 1995 and 2009.