Yiannis Moralis was born in Arta in 1916 and died in Athens in 2009.
During his student years he attended the Sunday painting classes at the School of Fine Arts in Athens. In 1931, succeeding in the entrance exams, he enrolled in the preparatory department of the School, where he studied under Dimitrios Geraniotis. Later he studied at the workshops of Konstantinos Parthenis and Umbertos Argyros, and from 1933 he attended evening classes at the engraving workshop of Yannis Kefallinos. In 1936, the year of his graduation, he secured a scholarship from the Academy of Athens to study suffrage abroad. So, the following year he left with his friend the painter Nikos Nikolaou for Rome, but soon he left to settle in Paris. There he studied at the School of Fine Arts, painting with Charles Guerin and mural painting with Ducos de l’Haille. At the same time he studied at the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, taking voting courses. He returned to Greece with the declaration of the Second World War, to enlist. In 1947 he was elected a full professor in the preparatory department of the School of Fine Arts and ten years later a full professor in the chair of painting, a position in which he remained until 1983. In the years 1959 – 1962 he designed and executed the engraved composition of the exterior wall of the Hilton Hotel in Athens. He also dabbled in ceramics, illustration and scenography, working for the National Theatre, Greek Dance Drama and Karolos Koon’s Art Theatre.

His honors include the bronze medal at the 1940 Panhellenic, the gold medal at the International Handicrafts Exhibition in Munich in 1973, his election as a full member of the International Institute of Letters and Arts (1962), the order of the Commander of the Phoenix (1979) and the Excellence in Letters and Arts of the Academy of Athens (1979). He exhibited for the first time individually in 1959 in “Armos”. He participated in group and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1958) and the Lausanne Tapestry Biennale (1965, 1972). In 1988, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the National Gallery, followed by the artist’s large donation to the museum. In 1996 the Academy of Athens organized an exhibition in his honor.

An artist who decisively influenced the landscape of post-war art in Greece, both with his visual work and with his teaching, he succeeded in combining the classic with the modern in his painting. Although he was interested in a variety of thematic categories, such as landscape or still life, his work, both in its realistic and geometric phases, is essentially anthropocentric, centered on love and death.