Tilemachos Kyriazatis (Τηλέμαχος Κυριαζάτης) is a Greek painter based in Athens.
“My first memory is of my mother dyeing yarn for the loom — my brother and I mixing the colours beside her.”
This early intimacy with colour has shaped a practice spanning three decades and two deeply connected bodies of work.
Kyriazatis studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and has spent over twenty years painting large-scale oil paintings of commercial tankers and maritime vessels. Bold, graphic, and atmospheric, these works name each ship after a figure from Greek mythology – Artemis, Amphitrite, Orpheus, Thetis, Triton – elevating the modern vessel to the status of ancient myth. For Kyriazatis, ships are not industrial objects but “travelling souls”: carriers of the endless human quest that has connected civilizations since antiquity.
His recent figurative oil paintings grow from the same roots. Drawing on the visual language of ancient Greek vase painting, he explores the nude form in flat, saturated colour, embedding symbolic motifs — a flower before it opens, a bird mid-flight, a hand reaching toward something unnamed. The mythology that lived inside steel now has skin.
Kyriazatis has exhibited internationally with Stephanie Hoppen Gallery and Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in London, with work shown at art fairs across Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Battersea. His paintings are held in private collections in the UK, Greece, New York, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, Cyprus and internationally.
He is based in Athens and available for commissioned works and exhibition enquiries.