Yannis Adamakos was born in 1952 in Pyrgos, Ilia. He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Athens and Tinos. As one of the most distinguished Greek artists reinvigorating abstract painting, Yannis Adamakos creates indeterminate landscapes—reflections of the sensory world as filtered through memory. The landscape, the human figure, and space emerge suggestively through layers and traces of painterly and gestural marks.
The artist captures the qualities and atmospheres evoked by light, shadow, and darkness, using gradations of black as well as various tonalities of color. He constructs an "internal" light that often emerges from the blackness at the depth of the painting, a nebulous, nocturnal, or flickering light that creates space, volumes, rhythm, and plasticity.
Adamakos is intrigued by the threshold between figurative and non-figurative painting, the balance between explosion and calmness, spontaneity and order, light and darkness. He is also concerned with rendering the void as something essential—the minimal that contains a richness of meaning and sensation.
He works on both small and large-scale pieces in series, starting from an expressionism that gradually leads to more "silent" landscapes and an expressive geometry. His works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Greece, across Europe, and in New York. In 2008, Agra Publications released the monograph Yannis Adamakos: Painting 1977-2007.