Nikos Sofialakis was born in Erfous, Rethymnon, Crete, Greece in 1914 and died in Athens, Greece in 2002. At the age of ten he came to Athens and from 1925–1937 he apprenticed under the neoclassical sculptor Georgios Bonanos.[1]  He continued his training with a scholarship from the Athina Stathatou Legacy Foundation, (without which he would not have been able to study during the German occupation of Greece in WWII), entering the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1938, where he studied under the sculptor and Professor Michalis Tombros. During the course of his studies he received four recognitions and two first place awards.[2]

Sofialakis began charting his artistic course while still a student at the Athens School of Fine Arts, participating in the 1940 Pan-Hellenic Artists Exhibition at the Zappeion with his plaster study Head of Youth, and taking part in various other group exhibitions, such as the ‘Professional’ Exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens (with contemporaries Efthymiades, Kefallinos, Nicolas, Katraki, et al.), the Parnassos Exhibitions of 1944, 1945, 1946 and the French Academy Exhibition of 1946 among others.[3]



In his final year at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Sofialakis won the 1944 First Prize in Sculpture with his diploma presentation Maternity, a terracotta study of a mother nursing her child in miniature size.