ITHACA REGAINED

GREEK ARTISTS IN NEW YORK

Steve Gianakos

For over 30 years, Steve Gianakos has been playing vulgarity and humor against sophistication in his paintings. Using mostly old, non-specific cartoon graphics, rendered through a mechanical process, Gianakos portrays the human condition as an absurd interplay of sexuality and psychological fragmentation. From his deceptively simple nursery-rhyme drawings from the 1970s to his collages on distressed paper to his most recent paintings, Gianakos creates lewd and fantastical images with a dead-on formal refinement.

Born in New York in 1938, he has chosen a far different path from that of his older brother, Cris. Influenced by the Pop art movement during the 1960s while studying industrial design at Pratt Institute, he began sculpting and drawing cartoon-like works depicting satirical, yet playful, views of men and women in American culture. Ironic, humorous and insightful, Gianakos’s expressions seek to expose the absurd, sometimes cruel, nature of sexual discourse, as well as poke fun at the more mundane aspects of day to day contemporary life.

Gianakos has taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York; University of Colorado, Boulder; and Memphis Academy of Arts. He has had over 75 solo exhibitions in the United States and is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other notable public collections.