George Petrides
Lineage of the Future
Biography
Born in Athens in 1964 and based in Athens and New York, George Petrides makes figurative sculpture for public spaces. His portraits explore family memory, historical experience and the ways inherited stories take physical form. Sulālat al-Mustaqbal brings those concerns together in six portraits of the people closest to him.
In the artist’s words
“For the series, the highest accolade will be for people to recognize their own families in mine.” — George Petrides
Education and career
Petrides studied Classics at Harvard College (B.A., 1985) and earned an M.B.A. and M.A. at Stanford University (1993). He held senior roles at Lazard Frères and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. He began studying art part-time in 1996, at the Art Students League in New York and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, committed to a full-time practice in 2017, and received a Certificate in Sculpture from the New York Studio School in 2022.
Practice
He combines traditional sculptural methods with twenty-first-century technology. Each work begins in clay, is developed through 3D scanning and digital sculpting, fabricated in recycled material and returned to the hand for finishing, so that the surface carries the marks of the process. Other works are cast in bronze. His subjects remain individuals, even when their scale gives them a public presence.
Selected commissions and public work
Commissions include works for Tiffany & Co. and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The White House accepted Davy Crockett at the Alamo as a Presidential Gift in 2025. His public sculpture record counts forty permanent placements, completed and in progress, across seven sectors and eight countries: fifteen outdoor and twenty-five indoor. Completed examples include Refugee-Woman of Smyrna in Neo Psychiko, Athens, and Head of Thalia II at Tiffany & Co., The Landmark, New York.
Public art and healthcare
Six of his fifteen outdoor works are installed, or being installed, at maternity and children’s hospitals. He founded publicart.health, a research repository on installed art in healthcare.