Mytaras Dimitris

He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1953-1957) under Yannis Moralis and Spyros Papaloukas. During the period 1961-1964, on a scholarship from the State Scholarship Service, he continued his studies in Paris, where he attended lessons in set design at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Decoratifs under Labisse and J.L. Barreau and interior decorating at the Metiers d’Arts.

From 1964 to 1972 he was head of the studio of Interior Decoration at the Athens Technological Institute while in 1975 he was elected professor at the School of Fine Arts. In 1978, with the assistance of the Municipality, he founded with his wife Harikleia a painting school in Chalkida.
Throughout his artistic career he has been very active in the exhibition field, including numerous participations in group and international exhibitions as well as many solo shows in Greece and abroad. Among his most important participations are those at the Biennales of Alexandria in 1958 and 1966, Youth in Paris 1960, Sao Paolo in 1966 and Venice in 1972. In 1961 he presented his first solo exhibition at the Zygos gallery and since then there have been a number of outstanding retrospectives: 1989 at the Pieridis Gallery, the Vellideio Foundation and the Eirmos gallery of Thessaloniki, 1992 at the Chateau Cenonceau in France, 1995 the National Gallery and 1998 the Millegarden Museum of Stockholm while it was the Cultural Capital of Europe.

In addition to painting he has been extensively involved with set design, working in cooperation with the State Theater of Northern Greece, the Art Theater, and the Greek Ballet of Rallou Manou, as well as many important Greek troupes. He has also decorated hotels, factories and bank branches in Greece and abroad with wall paintings. In the framework of his broader interest in art he has written various theoretical texts, published in 1989 in a book entitled Μη μιλάς πολύ για τέχνη (Don’t Talk Too Much About Art).

His painting, anthropocentric by and large, is characterized by a strongly drawn line and pure and powerful color. Starting off with photorealism, he subsequently was influenced by abstraction and ended with an expressionistic form, while a large part of his work shows a marked tendency toward social criticism.