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STEVE GIANAKOS

06.09.07 - 20.10.07

"Dining without music was unforgivable", 2006, mixed media, 71 X 65 cm
























 

Steve Gianakos began to exhibit his work in New York since 1966, during the climax of Pop Art. He has won many prizes and grants among which the Guggenheim in 1996. Recently the museum of modern art N.Y. acquired some of his drawings. Until this day, he has had 27 solo shows in the U.S.A. and Europe and he has participated in numerous group shows together with other great American artists.

Steve Gianakos constructs attractive and alluring images, whose narration refers to the decades of "innocence" of the 60's and 70's. An era of prolonged youth, which made people dream -even naively-, offering a new cultural identity. The artist creates characters that "shamelessly" devote themselves to a provocative erotic game, in which, however, real violence is absent; characters that will mature with no consequences and without losing their childishness.

The choice of form is usually made with a sense of humor and the narrative action is direct and obvious, because what he is interested in is the state of mind. He wants all the stages of creation of his work as well as the relation to his previous work to be visible and this is why he treats his paintings as ready-made material, he isolates the elements that interest him and he recomposes them with the method of collage and assemblage.

Even his own portrait or historical and recognizable figures like Hitler, little Lulu, or Jesus Christ, are freed from their meaning and are used as building materials for a painting of appropriation. This exhibition, which is his fourth solo exhibition in Greece, consists of a series of black-and-white drawings on paper.

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