Athens, 1948 – Athens, 2021
His engagement with painting began in his father’s shoemaking workshop. He then apprenticed for many years with the icon painter Dionysis Karoussos. He took drawing lessons with Panos Sarafianos and studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1969–1972) under Nikos Nikolaou and Yiannis Moralis. In 1978 he settled in Paris, where he lived until 1992. In the French capital he also met Yiannis Tsarouchis. In 2000 he was elected assistant professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he taught until 2015, heading the Fresco and Portable Icons Workshop. He also worked extensively in icon painting and executed frescoes for many small churches. Samios was one of the most important and recognizable Greek figurative painters of the past decades. His early works, up until the mid-1980s, were in the spirit of realism, influenced mainly by Tsarouchis. They depicted interiors (often cafés), sometimes with a dreamlike quality, featuring human figures and especially female nudes. After 1985 his painting developed into a more personal idiom, with references to Surrealism: elongated figures smoke, converse, and flirt in strange interiors, evoking both his training in Byzantine art and his profound knowledge of European modernism. His later works were dominated by childhood memories and references to artists of the past. He exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. His first solo exhibition, ‟Mount Athos,” featuring paintings that illustrated the calendar of AGET–Heracles company, was hosted at Zoumboulakis Gallery (Athens, 1978). Thereafter followed solo exhibitions in Paris, London, New York, among other cities, as well as throughout Greece. In 1999, the Patras Municipal Gallery hosted his retrospective ‟30 Years of Painting,” curated by Olga Mentzafou-Polyzou. Another retrospective, ‟Painting Apology,” was held at the Benaki Museum in 2014, curated by Maria Xanthakou. His last solo exhibition, ‟Café Paradise,” opened in September 2020 at Skoufa Gallery.