Constantinos Yiannikouris was born in Paphos in 1939.

On completion of his secondary education in his home town, he moved to Paris, to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he lives ever since.

Within an abstract expressionistic spirit, he developed his language that combines contemporary abstraction with an abstract reductivism of ancient and byzantine art. Besides painting, he works with the mediums of fresco, mosaic and tapestry.

Glyn Hughes comments on the work of Yiannikouris:

'His work is buoyant and lyrical. Colours are fresh and limpid and even a brush mark can denote form, an edge to a form, a suggestion of many things. The flecks of paint and mottled surfaces are floating over the canvas as if surrounding the images in their mystery, where a fine, sensitive, nervous line holds a face in antiquity. A band of blue gives a pictorial weight and also is the evening sky. Excellent works.

His huge canvas bounces with glory and he succeeds in using so many pigments and textures without losing any tension at all. And yet the tension is deliciously counterbalanced by a relaxed, floating feeling as if you’re caught amongst the sun’s rays in a beautiful garden where the windows of a greenhouse add diamonds to the foliage. He uses the light seen through shutters to travel in unison across his canvas. Figurative shapes do appear now and again, but they are not essential. Perhaps they are there to urge us to join the halcyon splendour. But it is the magic of chance and the physical impression which gives these works their sensual beauty. When the colour is forced into a small space, the effect is dazzling and when spread over the largest canvases it is as if butterflies have been freed’.

Yiannikouris has executed monumental works (fresco and mosaic) for public buildings both in France and Cyprus and has exhibited extensively in France, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.

His work is found in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain, the State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art, the Nicosia Municipality Collection, the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Centre, the Central Bank of Cyprus Art Collection and many more public and private collections.