Nikolaos Kessanlis was born in Thessaloniki in 1930. He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Yannis Moralis from 1950 to 1955, working at the same time as an assistant to Jannis Spyropoulos and Nikos Nikolaou. His works of this period are illustrative of the influence that cubism, then the main modern academic aesthetic, had on his work. He received a scholarship from the Italian Institute of Athens and moved to Rome in 1955 to study restoration at the Instituto Centrale del Restauro. There, he worked as a preservationist for the church of the Eremitani in Padua in the context of its wall painting restoration. In Italy, he created the Gruppo Sigma along with Yannis Gaitis, Dimitris Kontos, Vlassis Caniaris and Kostas Tsoclis.
After having proven his artistic knowledge, he was elected as a professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1981 and settled permanently in Athens at the beginning of the following year. He also served as rector of the school until 1996.
A restless artist who never stopped experimenting with techniques and methods, he managed to transcend traditional painting materials and has found himself at the forefront of the avant-garde throughout his career. From the more conventional post-cubist compositions, he moved on to informal art, abstract expressionism, then mechanical art and finally to his photomechanical works, created on sensitised cloth or cement, with which he is now associated.
The year 1961 marked a turn towards utmost contemporary considerations for Kessanlis. In that year, he settled in Paris where he forged close ties with the art group Nouveaux Realistes and their theorist Pierre Restany. During this period, he became acquainted with the use of found objects (objets trouvés) and textiles, leading to the creation of his Gestures series. Five years later, his photomechanical technique was developed and honed as the Reformations series. From that point onwards, he balanced painting (which he re-embraced in the 1990s) and his mechanical inclinations.
He exhibited works as early as 1952, then showed three works at the Panhellenio. His first ever solo show took place in 1957, at the Obelisco gallery in Rome. Since then, his most notable exhibitions include: the Venice Biennale (1958, 1976, 1988), the Sao Paulo Biennale (1961, 1963), the Paris Biennale of Young Artists (1963, 1965), Nikos Kessanlis (retrospective 1955–1997), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (1997), Athens Biennale (2007), Nikos Kessanlis: From Matiere to the Image, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Elefsina Cultural Centre (2007).
Nikos Kessanlis passed away in 2004 in Athens. Since his death, several retrospective presentations of his work have been organised (AD gallery (2006), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2007)) and a monograph on his work was published in 2009.
