Elliniko, Ioannina, 1942
He studied sculpture on scholarship at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1961–1966), in the workshop of Yiannis Pappas. In 1967, on a two-year scholarship from the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY), he studied ancient art, traveling extensively to Egypt, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Southern Italy, Sicily, and elsewhere. In 1970, he was appointed assistant in Pappas’s sculpture workshop at the ASFA. Between 1981 and 1982, he received further training in contemporary sculptural materials and techniques in Paris, at the École Nationale des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art. He taught sculpture at the ASFA until 2009 and is now Professor Emeritus. Papagiannis is among the most important living Greek sculptors. His public sculptures are characterized by a traditional, realist idiom. In his freer work, however, he assimilates lessons from modernism — particularly the art of Henry Moore — as well as influences from prehistoric, archaic, and folk sculpture. Since the early 1990s, with his ‟Polyester Figurines” and later the ‟Ghosts” series (1994), he began using materials such as wood, metal, and clay to create totemic forms rooted equally in prehistoric and folk traditions. His series of clay figurines similarly recall Mycenaean small-scale sculpture. He has held more than fifty solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad and has participated in numerous group shows. In recent years, he has been a leading figure in organizing sculpture symposia in various cities across Greece and Cyprus, creating large-scale works on site. His monumental sculptures, busts, and statues of significant personalities are installed in public spaces, while his works are also held in museums and private collections in Greece and abroad. He has received many distinctions, including First Prize in an international competition for a sculpture at Chicago Airport (2011). In 2015, he was awarded the Commander of the Order of the Phoenix by the Presidency of the Hellenic Republic, and in 2019 he received the Silver Medal — the highest distinction of the Academy of Athens — in the Division of Letters and Fine Arts. In 2009, he founded the ‟Theodoros Papagiannis Museum of Contemporary Art” in his birthplace, Elliniko.