Theodoros Stamos was a Greek painter. Born in New York in 1922, Stamos began his artistic education at the American Artists School. In 1943, aged 21, Stamos held a solo exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery in New York. He would exhibit regularly at the gallery for the next nine years. In the years following his first solo show, Stamos was invited to exhibit at the Whitney Museum, New York in 1945 and at both the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947. During this time Stamos’ work was seen to represent organic forms and geological shapes, the muted colour palette of earthy colours lending itself well to the apparently biological imagery. The critical success of the artist’s abstracted compositions was such that Stamos became a member of the Irascible Eighteen, the so-called ‘first generation’ of the abstract expressionist movement in America. In around 1950, the artist began to develop his approach to abstraction. Initially experimenting with overlays of dark brushwork in the style of calligraphy, Stamos eventually began to layer shades of thin pigment in order to create depth in his simplified compositions.

Much of the 1950s and 1960s were spent travelling, first within the United States and later in Europe. These travels influenced Stamos’ work significantly in his later years. From 1970 onwards until his death Stamos spent much of his time in Greece, particularly on the island Lefkada in the Ionian Sea, which influenced much of the artist’s later work. Stamos died in Greece in 1997. His work remains in the collection of the National Gallery of Greece.