Ilias Dekoulakos was born in Athens in 1929. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens in 1956, he worked as an apprentice to Spyros Papaloukas until 1958. From 1960 to 1968, he taught freehand drawing at the School of Decorative Arts of the Athens Technological Institute, complementing the syllabus with supplementary courses at his own Workshop of Free Painting Studies from 1969 to1972. In 1982, he obtained a full professorship as the Chair of Painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he stayed until his public resignation in 1988.
Dekoulakos’ corpus turned towards abstraction in the 1960s, and the artist began to manifest his leftist political leaning more explicitly — an audacious decision in Greece at the time. The authorities took note of Dekoulakos’ increasing political opposition and censured some of his exhibitions in the 1970s. Interestingly, while abstraction meant the artistic embrace of politics, these ideologies would in turn require Dekoulakos to forgo abstraction and revert to figuration. He adopted an airbrushed, photo-realist style of figuration so close to visual perfection that it created a distance and gave a sense of surrealism to the pears and pipes the artist favoured as subjects during in this period. In this work, he confronts the viewer with the unrealistic nature of perfection. Documentary photography also played an important part in this transition and was a practice he would keep active (but also private) throughout his career. His accumulated photographic archive is extensive and the source of most recent research on his corpus.
The end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s saw Dekoulakos turn his critical attention to technology and the place it was progressively occupying in society. A 1984 solo exhibition in the Ora Gallery in Athens saw him employ these new tools (objects, gadgets, video-projections) in a grand installation. After this intense focus on technology, Dekoulakos reverted back to nature for a while, producing mainly landscapes of Mani and Athens from 1985 onwards.
Despite being a somewhat politically incorrect figure, Dekoulakos enjoyed much support and visibility through exhibitions and collaborations. Athenian galleries helped him cement his reputation with solo shows at the Zygos Gallery in 1963, The Hilton Gallery in 1973, the Nees Morfes Gallery in 1973, the Desmos Gallery in 1979 and, as previously mentioned, the Ora Gallery in 1984. He also took part in several exhibitions at the Panhellenies Gallery in 1957, 1960, 1963, 1965, represented Greece at the Paris Youth Biennale in 1961 and Alexandria Biennale in 1963, among others.