Special Information for the Artist
Greek painter, cartoonist and designer of theater. Born in Smyrna in 1920.
During the Asia Minor disaster, his father who was wealthy banker was the victim of Turkish atrocities. Thus, at the age of one year, Argyrakis found refuge in Greece, along with his mother, Galatea, his grandmother and brother. Penelope Delta saw to that he enrolled in Athens College of Psychiko. He tried twice to enroll in the Athens School of Fine Arts, but without success. Out of necessity, he turned to business studies in what now is the Athens University of Economics and Business.
She received painting lessons from Tsarouchis, who was his personal friend. He also claimed that she was a student of Kontoglou, Theophilos and Parthenis. He was the member of a social group that included G. Moralis, Nikos Hatzikiriakos-Gikas, Manos Hadjidakis and Nikos Gatsos.
Along with painting, he worked from very early on with the sketches and journalism. During the German occupation of Greece, he enlisted in the resistance organization EPON. His base was in the mountains Evritania.
In 1948 and 1951, he participated in exhibitions nationwide, and in 1957 participated in the International Youth Festival in Moscow and the Biennial Plan Talentino in Italy. At the same time he published articles and sketches in newspapers and magazines of that period (Avyi, Eleftheria, etc.).
In 1957 he published his first album with drawings and text under the heading “Odos Oneiron”. The album was a sharp, caustic, social satire of Greece in the 1950s that contains many mythological elements, and exudes an intense lyricism. Manos Hadjidakis was fascinated by the album, and composed music for a musical show by the same name that played at the "Metropolitan" theater in Athens in 1962 with the collaboration of Argyrakis (scenery, costumes, and lyrics in one of the songs), the director Alexis Solomos and actor Dimitris Horn. Argrakis and Hadjidakis collaborated again in 1965 in the musical show “The tour of the world”.
In 1963 he organized an exhibition in the gallery "Zigos" that focused on the invasion of foreign norms and social change in postwar Greece. In 1963, he was one of the founding members of the Lambrakis Democratic Youth. Shortly before the dictatorship, he created with his partner, Tsarouchis and Eugenios Spatharis, the "Ark of Amy", a pioneering space artistic experimentation, the Plaka, where were several happenings of reason, music and dance.
The junta closed down the "Ark of Amy, answer the pretext that it was not licensed for musical instruments” and Argyralkis went abroad, first to Spain, then to London and finally to Copenhagen, where he lived until 1974, as the guest of the sculptor Takis. In Copenhagen, published a second album of satirical cartoons and texts under the title “The state was sailing in the Melanolefkon”.
When the junta fell, he returned to Greece. In 1975 he illustrated an English travel guide for Greece (Fodor's Greece 1975). In 1981 he worked for the last time with Hadjidakis, creating scenery and costumes for the show “Pornography”. In 1984 he released his book ` Travelling in Greece`.
His health took a turn for the worse in 1990 and has since ceased to paint and to participate actively in life. In April 1997, he was placed in the Athens Home for the Aged. He died a year later before he could see the retrospective exhibition on his works at the National Gallery (October 1998).
