Room interior (1985)

While still a student at the School of Fine Arts, Costas Koutsouris was appointed assistant curator at the National Gallery, where he was initiated into the conservation of works of art by the conservators Georgios Hatzopoulos and Odysseas Phokas. After the Second World War, Koutsouris studied conservation, with a scholarship, at the Istituto Centrale di Restauro in Rome, and continued his training at the Louvre and the Munich Pinakothek. As a painter, he concerned himself exclusively with landscape, depicting corners of the Greek countryside (seas, picturesque hamlets, little harbours, small towns). He always painted in the open air and from life - an absolutely conscious option - remaining faithful to a graphic rendering of the landscape. In his painting, he expressed himself with bright colours, which he positioned with brush-strokes which are full of vibrancy and movement, within the context of an impressionist plein air approach, in which his chief preoccupation was the verisimilitude of the rendering of the real world, as he captured it unhurriedly, turning his gaze upon everyday life and the contemporary environment.