Michael Tombros was born in Athens in 1889.

He grew up on the island of Andros where he came into early contact with sculpture at his father’s marble-working studio.

Tombros enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, Athens where he studied sculpture and drawing, from 1903 till 1909 under Georgios Vroutos, Lazaros Sochos, Alexandros Kaloudis and Dimitrios Geraniotis. A year after his graduation he established his workshop in Athens.

In 1914 on a scholarship he continued his studies in Paris at the Academie Julian in the workshops of Henri Bouchard and Paul Landowski. On the outbreak of World War I, Tombros returned to Greece to fight for his country.

Between 1919 and 1923 he taught at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens when he resigned due to the negative reactions to his critique against the establishment of a War Museum.

After he had his first solo exhibition in Athens in 1924 and up to 1928 he lived in Paris and exhibited at the prestigious Salon des Independants, Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries. He was acquainted with the Greek art critics Stratis Eleftheriades Teriade and Christian Zervos, the Greek artists George Gounaropoulos and Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika and the famous international artists Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

On his return to Athens, he exhibited his Parisian work to the astonishment of the Greek art scene. In 1933 he launched ‘20^th century’ (Εικοστός Αιώνας), the first Greek magazine devoted to the visual arts; generally, throughout his life contributed articles on art to newspapers and magazines.  

He was elected a professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1938, a position he held until his retirement in 1960, serving as a director between 1957 and 1959. In 1968 he was elected a member of the Academy of Athens and in 1970 held the position of President of the same institution.

In his numerous public statues and busts, Tombos demonstrates his knowledge of academic art, but in other works, especially in his smaller-scale sculptures, one can witness the influence of French modernism, particularly cubism and abstraction. From the 1950s onwards, his work uses more avant-garde references. The main characteristic of his work is the conversation between academic and modernist references.

Tombros exhibited extensively in Greece and abroad such as at the Venice Biennale (1934, 1938 and 1956) and the Sao Paolo Biennale (1955).

His work can be found in the National Gallery of Greece, the Municipal Gallery of Athens, the Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art in Andros, the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, the National Bank of Greece and many other public and private collections.