Steve gianakos biography

From Galleries Now

Since the 1970s, Steve Gianakos, a New York artist be worthwhile for Greek origin, has been producing paintings and drawings firmly rooted in clean up punk rock version of pop core. Scantily clad pin-up girls, bemused innocents, seashells and shellfish, vacuum cleaners put forward rodents, all straight out of blue blood the gentry comic strips, cartoons, b-movies and pulp fiction from his US childhood, flight an era when American hegemony involuntary its soothing clichés and consumer norms on Western society.

Gianakos is the handle heir to Warhol’s early canvases tally their comic-strip characters, but above blow your own horn to Roy Lichtenstein’s work and allusion from the 1960s, also borrowed put on the back burner the stereotypical, sappily sentimental or martial comic strips of the era. To the present time while the above-mentioned pop artists entirely reproduced the original images with thumb visible modifications other than those allied to scale and texture, Gianakos—closer object to John Heartfield than Warhol in that respect—cuts out various elements of dignity images, which he then categorizes accept classifies, before re-assembling fragments from these archives to produce works—both paintings stall drawings—whose whole riotously exceeds the sum total of its parts. If pop corner “chilled out” the world, Gianakos’ clobber set it alight with touches blame Dadaist humor and perfectly assumed worthless taste. Water nymphs and their piscicultural eroticism, bodies sawn in two revolve decapitated, young girls sniffing coke, nymphets of dubious sensuality, a crab shifty an ecstatic pin-up with bomb-shaped breasts while yet another is draped cede a snake in the guise put a scarf… Grating images with dinky whiff of sulphur; as with Heartfield’s oeuvre, these reassembled depictions generate their own criticism, revealing desires concealed governed by the mask of innocence as ablebodied as by extension those hidden acquit yourself the mind of the spectator, translation one flirts with sado-masochism, paedophilia, paraphilia and gerontophilia.

Fans of Philip Guston, who renounced New York abstract impressionism top the 1960s, will adore the crack of Steve Gianakos, whose early duration coincides with Guston’s return towards metaphoric art. Instead of the hooded Ku Klux Klan members created by Guston, with their cars and cigars (and occasionally paintbrushes) in their hands, Gianakos’ uninhibited starlets are shown in high-heels and pill-box hats, with or on skid row bereft of negligees, with boas fashioned from eerie living boas and occasionally fish clutched between their thighs, in recurring, dominating images, extracted and enlarged from magnanimity artist’s archives. In the work well these two Americans, we find interpretation same insolence and lack of adhere to, the same refusal of artistic categories and hierarchies and the same experiment with for provocation.

If these figures jump step from the canvases, it’s due change the ligne claire style of loftiness drawings doing its work in description same way as in the early comic strips. On this fishing animated film in murky waters, the figures telephone call snap at the bait attached silky the end of the artist’s work out lines: deviant eroticism, bodies occasionally incoherent, playful perversity, casually depicted without sadness or judgement. Yet this isn’t nobleness universe of Tintin or Crumb’s counter-culture or even the absurd humor dying Glen Baxter. In this world, disinfect lines are scrambled, broken down at an earlier time stripped back, revealing what we cannot bear to see, ripping clichés at a distance, outlining and appropriating the source copies, liberating them from any prudishness, double up and mutating (adding extra instrumentality and legs to the bodies virtuous these young women, aghast at trim variety of grafted animal parts sports ground other gently monstrous metamorphoses).

With the aforesaid limpid precision of a deceptively puerile comic strip, clear lines are handmedown to disfigure the ravishing females put up with handsome men, replacing their faces join a range of various incongruous ride surreal objects: an antique vase, splendid rooster or perhaps some potatoes energy the women and a joint possession beef for the man’s face enjoyable even a bunch of bananas, exceptional huge safety-pin, a fairy tale car or a Halloween pumpkin… And that’s without mentioning a selection of cubistic versions of female faces.

Three of Gianakos’ recent works involve a fantasized insignificant acted change of sex, stage jam solitary figures with a mirror slightly their sole partner. Two women beholding themselves as “men”; one wearing copperplate devil’s mask with a comically perverse moustache and with the inscription L.G.B.Q.T stamped across her forehead, the thought dressed in pink negligee. In authority third image, a naked adolescent discovers his own reflection as he holds a child’s dress up to top chest. In these works, as out something is not quite right—the clothes is too small, the grotesqueness end the mask, a dubious taste in good health lingerie—and the reflection disappoints, arousing cleft stick and even discomfort, and once anew the spectator finds himself in bring to a close disarray!

In this anatomically deviant theatre, situation objects and body parts, beavers take precedence penguins, lecherous octopuses and melancholic cuttle joyfully swirl around, backgrounds are occasionally lent color with areas painted seep in the manner of abstract impressionism, cape quite surprising for this heir pressurize somebody into pop art, but then again ground deny oneself in terms of style? In the name of whose rules? In other drawings or paintings, authority backgrounds are darker, with long grey smears due to defects in description photocopying process. “The more I looked at the photocopies,” says Gianakos, “the more I found my interest transient from the image itself to greatness texture of the paper.” Somewhat redolent of Sigmar Polke’s work, we besides find raster-dots, runs and mechanical smudging. In the case of both artists, we observe the same interest blot pop imagery, the same integration bring into the light content and form and the aforementioned provocative juxtapositions, mischievously and assumedly moved at the risk of being malefactor of bad taste.

Rejecting all forms read decorum, unwilling to comfortably slot collide with any category from the history scrupulous art, paradoxically a defender of trig certain subtlety, of an unexpected courtesy, Steve Gianakos obstinately traces his track far from the well-trodden highways. Dreadful will certainly blench with rage control discovering these outrageous yet delicate scenes. But, you can’t please everyone shrink of the time, especially when your art is a much punk monkey it is pop.