Kostas Valsamis

Kostas Valsamis was a Greek sculptor who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Athina, amongst others as a scholar of Kostas Dimitriadis, and from 1945 with a scholarship at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. There, he met his wife, Zoe, a painter. He mainly worked in plaster and bronze and followed simplified forms with expressionistic tendencies. Upon completion of his studies he settled permanently in Paris. Keeping pace with concurrent trends, Valsamis arrived at a personal style noted for a simplified form of expressionism and did not return to his homeland until shortly before his death.

In 1980 the French Ministry of Culture awarded him the title of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters and he was a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts from 1987. The life-size sculpture was erected in 1949 in the Tinaneios Garden in Peiraias by the Association of Greek Shipowners. At that time the work was called Ο Ποντοπόρος Έφηβος (The seafaring young man). In 1994 it was supposed to make way for another monument, but was re-erected shortly afterwards without its marble base and corresponding inscription. In the catalog of art competitions, the sculpture is listed as bronze but is shown as a plaster statue.