Kosmas Xenakis was born in Vraila Romania in 1925. He was a multi-talented architect and artist who painted, sculpted, wrote and composed.

The spectacular sculpture you see here is in the lobby of a 1960s building in the neighborhood of Kolonaki at Amerikis 20. And needs no entrance ticket to visit and admire it.

He studied architecture at the National Technical University (1942-1948) and in 1942-1943 attended lessons at the Athens School of Fine Arts. From 1955 to 1956, on a scholarship from the French government, he did post-graduate work at the research center C.S.T.B. in Paris, investigating the materials and techniques of building. His artistic education was completed by trips to Greece and America (1970-1971) made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

He started to exhibit in 1948 and presented his work in solo, Panhellenies and group exhibitions of painting and sculpture in Greece and abroad, such as the Alexandria Biennale of 1965 and the Brussels Europalia of 1982. In 1957 he held his first solo show in Athens and in 1990 a number of his paintings were presented at the National Gallery.

In the beginning he was a figurative painter, doing portraits, genre scenes, interiors, and allegorical and mythological subjects. Later he moved on to geometric abstraction and created compositions characterized by their special sensitivity to color combinations. His sculptural work was usually combined with architecture and includes relief compositions and groups made of concrete, marble and polyester and found in private dwellings, apartment buildings and public edifices in Greece and abroad.

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