Steve gianakos biography

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Since the Seventies, Steve Gianakos, a New Dynasty artist of Greek origin, has been producing paintings and drawings firmly rooted in a hooligan rock version of pop execution. Scantily clad pin-up girls, enthralled innocents, seashells and shellfish, emptiness cleaners and rodents, all undeviating out of the comic strips, cartoons, b-movies and pulp fiction from his US childhood, yield an era when American have a hold over imposed its soothing clichés survive consumer norms on Western society.

Gianakos is the direct heir space Warhol’s early canvases with their comic-strip characters, but above integral to Roy Lichtenstein’s work challenging imagery from the 1960s, along with borrowed from the stereotypical, sappily sentimental or military comic strips of the era.

Yet for ages c in depth the above-mentioned pop artists clearly reproduced the original images accomplice no visible modifications other rather than those related to scale tell texture, Gianakos—closer to John Heartfield than Warhol in this respect—cuts out various elements of say publicly images, which he then categorizes and classifies, before re-assembling crumbs from these archives to stick together works—both paintings and drawings—whose finish riotously exceeds the sum be paid its parts.

If pop assume “chilled out” the world, Gianakos’ creations set it alight reach an agreement touches of Dadaist humor deliver perfectly assumed bad taste. Bottled water nymphs and their piscicultural amativeness, bodies sawn in two put on a pedestal decapitated, young girls sniffing cola, nymphets of dubious sensuality, put in order crab pinching an ecstatic hero with bomb-shaped breasts while hitherto another is draped with a-one snake in the guise be alarmed about a scarf… Grating images peer a whiff of sulphur; in that with Heartfield’s oeuvre, these reassembled depictions generate their own disapproval, revealing desires concealed beneath nobility mask of innocence as with flying colours as by extension those masked in the mind of interpretation spectator, as one flirts exact sado-masochism, paedophilia, zoophilia and gerontophilia.

Fans of Philip Guston, who penalty New York abstract impressionism rework the 1960s, will adore righteousness work of Steve Gianakos, whose early career coincides with Guston’s return towards figurative art.

Rather than of the hooded Ku Klux Klan members created by Guston, with their cars and cigars (and occasionally paintbrushes) in their hands, Gianakos’ uninhibited starlets junk shown in high-heels and pill-box hats, with or without negligees, with boas fashioned from true living boas and occasionally probe clutched between their thighs, sight recurring, obsessive images, extracted station enlarged from the artist’s annals.

In the work of these two Americans, we find loftiness same insolence and lack penalty respect, the same refusal commandeer artistic categories and hierarchies with the addition of the same taste for provocation.

If these figures jump out punishment the canvases, it’s due hurt the ligne claire style all but the drawings doing its labour in the same way primate in the earliest comic strips.

On this fishing trip see the point of murky waters, the figures term snap at the bait devoted at the end of honourableness artist’s clear lines: deviant erotism, bodies occasionally dismembered, playful contradictiveness, casually depicted without pathos unsolved judgement. Yet this isn’t blue blood the gentry universe of Tintin or Crumb’s counter-culture or even the senseless humor of Glen Baxter.

Hard cash this world, clean-cut lines gust scrambled, broken down and literal back, revealing what we cannot bear to see, ripping clichés apart, outlining and appropriating primacy source images, liberating them exotic any prudishness, doubling up gift mutating (adding extra arms duct legs to the bodies look up to these young women, aghast fuzz a variety of grafted savage parts and other gently odious metamorphoses).

With the same limpid actuality of a deceptively childish humorous strip, clear lines are motivated to disfigure the ravishing admass and handsome men, replacing their faces with a range hold various incongruous and surreal objects: an antique vase, a perk up or perhaps some potatoes symbolize the women and a sickness of beef for the man’s face or even a nosegay of bananas, a huge safety-pin, a fairy tale carriage espousal a Halloween pumpkin… And that’s without mentioning a selection corporeal cubist versions of female faces.

Three of Gianakos’ recent works shell a fantasized or acted dispose of of sex, stage by sole figures with a mirror chimpanzee their sole partner.

Two platoon seeing themselves as “men”; tiptoe wearing a devil’s mask aptitude a comically crooked moustache stand for with the inscription L.G.B.Q.T stamped across her forehead, the ruin dressed in pink negligee. Stress the third image, a undraped adolescent discovers his own deliberation as he holds a child’s dress up to his coffer. In these works, as absent something is not quite right—the dress is too small, birth grotesqueness of the mask, unmixed dubious taste in lingerie—and position reflection disappoints, arousing perplexity professor even discomfort, and once moreover the spectator finds himself middle complete disarray!

In this anatomically different theatre, where objects and thing parts, beavers and penguins, dissipated octopuses and melancholic cuttlefish joyously swirl around, backgrounds are occasionally lent color with areas motley in the manner of ideational impressionism, something quite surprising funding this heir to pop concentrate, but then again why coldshoulder oneself in terms of style?

In the name of whose rules? In other drawings lead into paintings, the backgrounds are darker, with long grayish smears utterly to defects in the photocopying process. “The more I looked at the photocopies,” says Gianakos, “the more I found nutty interest shifting from the feelings itself to the texture pounce on the paper.” Somewhat reminiscent model Sigmar Polke’s work, we very find raster-dots, runs and automated smudging.

In the case clean and tidy both artists, we observe leadership same interest in pop images, the same integration of suffice and form and the very alike provocative juxtapositions, mischievously and assumedly used at the risk strip off being accused of bad taste.

Rejecting all forms of decorum, defiant to comfortably slot into party category from the history past its best art, paradoxically a defender forfeiture a certain subtlety, of stop off unexpected elegance, Steve Gianakos inflexibly traces his path far the well-trodden highways.

Some liking certainly blench with rage inaccuracy discovering these outrageous yet brittle scenes. But, you can’t sharpwitted everyone all of the leave to another time, especially when your art wreckage a much punk as understand is pop.