Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika was born in Athens in 1906.

As a young boy he showed an early inclination to drawing and while still at school he attended art lessons with Constantinos Parthenis.

In 1922 he moved to Paris where he studied French literature and Aesthetics at the Sorbonne. Two years later he enrolled at the Academie Ranson to study painting under Roger Bissiere and etching with Dimitrios Galanis.

He first exhibited in Paris in 1923 at the Salon des Surindependants. In 1927 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Percier in Paris. A year later he returned to Greece to serve in the army and had his first exhibition in Athens with sculptor Michael Tombros at the Strategopoulos Gallery. In 1930 he settled in Paris and returned to Athens four years later a respected artist.

Between 1935 and 1937 he edited ‘The Third Eye’ magazine, together among others, architect Dimitris Pikionis. In 1937 he restored the ancestral home of the Ghika family in Hydra, where he painted the first works in which his artistic style would be expressed decisively combing elements of cubism, nature, light and the architecture of Greece.

In 1941 he was elected a professor of drawing at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens, a position he held until 1958.

He married Barbara Hutchinson in 1961, who was previously married to Victor Rothschild, 3^rd Baron Rothschild.

In 1972 he was elected a member of the Academy of Athens and in 1985 an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He was granted honorary doctorates from the School of Architecture of the University of Thessaloniki in 1982 and by the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens in 1991.

Hadjikyriakos-Ghika was also involved in designing stage sets and costumes for theatrical works such as Aristophanes’s Clouds at the National Theatre of Greece (1951) and Comedie Francaise (1952) and Gide’s ballet Persephone, with music by Stravinsky in Covent Garden (1961).

He also illustrated a number of books including Nikos Kazantzakis’s Odyssey (1958), C.P. Cavafys Poems (1966) and Longos’s Daphne and Chloe (1970). His writings include several books, studies and articles on architecture and aesthetics, as well as treatises on Greek art.

More than fifty exhibitions of Hadjikyriakos-Ghika works have been held in Athens, Paris, London, Geneva, Berlin and New York.

His work can be found in the National Gallery of Greece, the Municipal Gallery of Athens, the Leventis Gallery, the National Bank of Greece, the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and many other public and private collections.