Greek artist Valerios Caloutsis was born on the island of Crete in 1927. After studying at the school of art in Athens, he came to England in 1952 and was for a while a student at St. Martins School of Art. In 1953 he moved to Paris where he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He settled in the French capital and lives there today. He achieved success, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, with fiercely abstract works in a variety of media. He exhibited at the Redfern Gallery, London in the early 1960s and before one such show was interviewed by Mervyn Levy for an article in the magazine Studio. Levy said Caloutsis 'is an abstract painter, but one who has long ago sounded, and rejected as merely fatuous, the trivial possibility of those forms and styles of abstract expression which do not quickly move into the province of discipline and order. His love of texture is the love of the earth; of the multi-lingual, multi-mullioned tongues with which the textural qualities of nature itself speak, and impose upon our senses, a pattern of incredible richness and wonder'. Caloutsis is represented in the permanent collections of galleries in Melbourne, Australia and Toledo, USA and at Worcester College, Oxford.
