Constantin ANDREOU (São Paulo, 1917- Athens, 2007) Blast Furnaces, 1961 Oil on canvas, titled and dated on back 116 x 89.5 cm Born in São Paulo in 1917, Constantin Andreou spent the first years of his life in Brazil, before moving to Athens with his family at the age of 8. It was in 1942, with Portrait de mon frère (1935), a marble head exhibited at the Salon Panhellénique in Athens, that he achieved notoriety and won a grant from the French government. After arriving in Paris in 1945, where he had previously worked exclusively in stone and marble, Andréou developed his experience as a metallurgist, perfecting a welded brass technique. In parallel with his work as a sculptor, Andréou began a career as a painter in the 1950s. Constantin Andréou's work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions since the late 1940s: Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Brussels, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Monaco, Lund, Bordeaux, Mulhouse... and notably a special exhibition at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris in 1951, and at the Petit Palais in 1953 "Sept sculpteurs grecs de Paris", at the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art in 1953, or a retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre in 1971... The ensemble of works - sculptures, paintings, drawings, lithographs and jewelry - presented today is testimony to the nearly 40 years of friendship between the artist and his collectors.