Valias Semertzidis was born in Russia in 1911. His father was of Greek descent, and his mother was Russian. 

In 1923, following the Russian Revolution and the creation of the Russian Federation, his parents moved to Greece where his father established a Dance School. 

In 1928 he enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, Athens where he studied painting under Constantinos Parthenis, a figure whose influence is evident in his early works.

Between 1923 and 1937 Semertzidis worked primarily on poster art and book illustration to support himself and from 1937 to 1940 he exhibited with ‘Ελεύθεροι Καλιτεχναι’, a group of communist artists that included Alexandros Koroyiannakis, Demetris Yioldasis, Costas Plakotaris and Dimitrios Davis.

During the German occupation of Greece, Semertzidis was an active member of the Greek resistance and fled to the mountains to fight the Nazi regime. This was an influential period that later inspired his great works showing the hardship endured by Greeks during the German occupation.

After the second world war, he worked on woodcuts and linocuts and experimented with new oxidation techniques on zinc and copper. During this period his work is divided into two parts; Firstly, capturing the everyday life and the social struggles of the working class and secondly landscape painting. His landscape paintings influenced mostly by his teacher Constantinos Parthenis.

From 1964 to his death he spent much of his time on the island of Rhodes where he worked on large scale fresco works for public buildings and hotels, inspired by the island’s landscape.

In the early years of the dictatorship, a major solo touring exhibition of his work was shown in twenty-five cities of the former Soviet Union. He exhibited at the 1963 Alexandria Biennale and participated in many international printmaking fairs worldwide such as in London, Cairo, Geneva, Leipzig, Birmingham and New York.

In 1977 the National Gallery of Greece organised a large-scale retrospective of his work and later, in 2012 the Benaki Museum staged an important posthumous retrospective.

His work can be found in the National Gallery of Greece, the Municipal Gallery in Athens, the Municipal Gallery in Rhodes, the Averoff Gallery, the Benaki Museum and many other public and private collections.