The sculptor George Zongolopoulos was born in Athens in 1903 and studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

Between 1930 and 1938, having graduated from the ASFA, he worked as an architect at the Ministry of Education, but in 1938, he resigned from his position there to dedicate himself entirely to sculpture.

Throughout his artistic career, Zongolopoulos closely intertwined sculpture with architecture.

As a scholarship holder of the French government, he continued his studies and worked in Paris, while with a scholarship from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation, he went to Italy for further studies, where he explored bronze-casting techniques.

In the 1950s, influenced by his travels abroad and exposure to new artistic movements, he moved artistically toward abstraction.

A restless and methodical spirit, always progressive in his views and positions, he experimented with many techniques and materials. Marble and bronze were his first materials; stainless steel, Plexiglas, lenses, light, and water were those through which he introduced in his work the concepts of volume, fullness and void, movement, and sound.

The “eternal adolescent,” as George Zongolopoulos was often called, sought measure, harmony, and balance in his art, leaving us with ethereal and transparent works infused with his creative breath.

He represented Greece nine times at the Venice Biennale, at the Cairo Biennale in 1947, and at the São Paulo Biennale in 1957. He took part in all Panhellenic exhibitions – except during the dictatorship period (1967–1974) – and participated in dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad.

He received numerous first prizes in competitions and many honorary distinctions. Particularly significant were his awards with the First Panhellenic Prize: for the Zalongo Monument in 1954, for the design of Omonia Square with water fountains and sculpture in 1958, for the sculpture of the Thessaloniki International Fair in 1966, while his hydrokinetic sculpture Umbrellas not only won him the First Pan-European Prize but, when installed at the main entrance of the Cour d’Honneur of the Council of Ministers of the European Union building in Brussels, became a distinct honor for him and for Greece as a whole.

George Zongolopoulos, tireless, created until the end of his long life with unquenchable passion and fervent enthusiasm for art. His rich artistic activity spanned eight decades and was distinguished by an unceasing spirit of renewal and evolution.

In 2004, he founded the George Zongolopoulos Foundation, to which he bequeathed his entire body of work.