Biography

Steve Gianakos’ origin was from Kissamos, Chania, Crete, satirical visual artist, was born in 1938 in New York. His parents were first-generation Cretan immigrants Manolis Hatzigiannakis and Anna Pateromichelakis. His brother Chris Gianakos (born in 1934) is also an internationally distinguished Greek-American artist, with his post-minimalist work clearly interacting with architecture and the surrounding space, who taught from 1963 at the School of Visual Arts. The two brothers grew up in a broad multicultural community, as Steve Gianakos testifies in a recent interview (Myrto Vassiliadou, “Stev Gianakos talks to “K”: Pop art, humor, freedom and tsarouchia”, Kathimerini, 8/2/2023 ): “Neighbors and friends were black, Puerto Rican, Egyptian, and Pakistani. We played in the streets with broomsticks and bottle caps.” He will initially study at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, but will soon return to New York to attend industrial design studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, during the period when the Greek-American visionary architect and designer William Katavolos (1924-2020) was teaching there. Through the latter's radiant circle, he will also meet another Greek-American, Nick Zografos (b. 1931), a famous furniture designer, who maintained an exhibition on Lexington Avenue. Then he will come into contact with one of the most prominent artists of the Diaspora, Louka Samaras (b. 1936), and will see his work for the first time in an important exhibition of the latter at the Green Gallery. After graduating from Pratt in 1964, Gianakos established his studio in Soho, New York in 1966, in a space previously owned by the prominent Pop Art pioneer artist of the period, Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022). Thanks to his acquaintance with Oldenburg, Gianakos will decide to turn to painting, participating in important group exhibitions, such as the “The Dimensional Surface” exhibition at A.M. Sachs Gallery, and at the “Plastic as Plastic” exhibition at the Philadelphia I.C.A. the same year. Three years later, in 1969, his first solo exhibition was organized at the Fischbach Gallery, and since then solo exhibitions were organized very often, mainly in New York (in the years 1974, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1983 at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 1984, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 2001, 2009), as well as in Athens, in the AD Art Gallery (in the years 1997, 199, 2001, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2017), but also in his birthplace Crete, at the LS Art Gallery in Elounda (2001), and at the Municipal Art Gallery of Chania (2010), curated by Peggy Kounenaki. More recently, three of his exhibitions were organized in Paris, at the Semiose Art Gallery (“Figures on a Knife Edge”, 2017; “Rare Species”, 2021; “How to Murder Your Pet”, 2022), and one at the Citronne Gallery in Athens (“I…Loop de loop…”, 2023). An important exhibition of his work was also held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dole, France in 2017 with the teasing title: “Who's afraid of Steve Gianakos”, while his participation in the group exhibition “Exile on Main Street” at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht in 2009, where nine artists were selected including William Copley (1919-1996), Alfred Jensen (1903-1981), Peter Saul (b. 1934) and Joe Zucker (b. 1941), is certainly important. He will also participate – like his brother – in the exhibition “Modern Odysseys” at the Queens Museum of Art in 1999, with an introduction by Peter Selz, where 34 of the most prominent artists of the Diaspora were represented (among them Baziotes, Chryssa, Constant, Hadji , Samaras, Stamos, Vagis, Voulkos and Xceron). In 2011 he participated in the “Polyglossia” exhibition of the Onassis Foundation in Athens and in 2012 in the “Anti-Culture” exhibition: The emergence of a new social “subject” and “The Athenian Underground” at CAMP in Athens, which will be followed by a multi-page edition of a collection of articles under the same title, by Athens Voice, edited by Thanasis Moutsopoulos, dedicated to the memory of Leonidas Christakis (1928-2009) and Lazarus Zikos (1940-2011). In the same year, he will participate in the New York MoMA exhibition entitled “Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration”. More recently, he participated in two more important group exhibitions, in 2014 at the Flag Art Foundation in New York (“Disturbing Innocence”, curated by Erich Fischl) and in 2015 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in the same city. Also noteworthy are his participations in group exhibitions in 1989 in Tokyo (“Images of American Pop Culture III”), in 1987 in London (“Cosmic Iconoclasms”, ICA Gallery), at the James Goodman Gallery in New York entitled “Strong Statements in Black and White” the same year, and in 1984 in Mexico City (Museo Tamayo). In 1985, a 30-second video will be shown in Times Square, New York, for 12 days, 50 times per day, as part of the series of video presentations entitled “Messages to the Public” that lasted from 1982 to 1992, with works of distinguished multimedia artists (including the Guerrilla Girls, Keith Harring, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Richard Prince), through a giant screen of approximately 170 square meters lit by 8,000 red, white, blue and green lamps. Gianakos was honored with the Guggenheim Museum's Theodoran Award in 1977, the same year he also participated in the group exhibition “Contemporary Greek-American Artists”, organized by the Brooklyn Museum. In 1995 he received a fellowship again from the Guggenheim Foundation; in 1996 he was awarded by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and in 1997 by the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation. His works can be found, among others, in the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art New York (MoMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the New York State Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, at the Neuberger Museum of Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the collections of the Judith Rothschild Contemporary Foundation and the Chase Manhattan Bank, as well as the collections of CNAP in France.

The work of Steve Gianakos, an eminently “unclassified” artist, is definitely lined up next to the work of artists who marked our time with their ingenuity and radicalism, as Denis Zacharopoulos emphasizes (see “Steve Gianakos ou fragments d'un discours savoureux', in Steve Gianakos, Semiose Editions, Paris 2015, no pagination), since he essentially invented a new dimension in creation, focusing on the immediacy of the gesture of visual language that thus produces a more straightforward meaning. The often intelligent use of satirical humor in clear distinction from crude mockery seems to be a basic component of his art as well, as has been rightly observed by Michel Leiris (see “Le peintre et son modèle”, in Ecrits sur l'art, Paris 2011, p . 364) for the case of Pablo Picasso, to whose work Gianakos makes direct references. The Greek-American artist emphasizes the transmission of the specific message that concerns him, by using very often the colors black and white; increasing its immediacy and many times the instant effect it has on the viewer. Gianako’s jokes could not be described in words, as they are much more effective as visual messages; his language – like Picasso's – is purely figurative. Gianako’s direct influences can be traced first to Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), who admired Gianako’s work, as he placed his artworks in his house in Southampton, Long Island, next to works by Andy Warhol ( 1928-1987), Dan Flavin (1933-1996) and Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) (see Vick Goldberg, “Still Subsersive After All These Years,” New York Times, 9/19/1993). Gianako’s references to Pop Art are considerably more suggestive than the early representatives of this revivalist current in modern art, such as Lichtenstein and Warhol used to. More direct and creative are his references to the art of the comic strip, with his favorite representatives Charles Addams (1912-1988) and Peter Arno (1904-1968), as he underlines in his interview to Alexis Vaillant (in the tribute to the artist in the fanzine Pleased to meet you, No 4, July/Juillet 2017). In that interview, Gianakos will emphasize the importance of cutting and combining different pieces in his work, indicating the influence that the surrealist method had on his creative process, with his priority always being the subject, which is why his admiration for ancient Greek art, with its simple and erotic dimension, is evident, with references to ancient Greek vase painting. In the continuation of his creative path he began to work more with the texture of his works, in a “controlled uncontrolled” type of art. Through his work he also does not hesitate, as he claims, to aim to be “irresponsibly funny, without repercussions”. His sources of inspiration also extend to film noirs, such as those of Fritz Lang, as well as novels of the corresponding genre in literature, such as those of Patricia Highsmith and Elmore Leonard. The artist has acquired, and not without reason, the reputation of the eternal child, as he states: “not growing up is a luxury. I still play at work every day. My imaginations are bigger than ever. I am completely happy!' Gianakos exudes the liberated atmosphere of New York in the 60s, when avant-garde artists began to become visible personalities, to definitively emerge from the margins, and even bright personalities that enlightened and dominated with their spirit. Through a controversial movement towards the avant-garde itself,he began to be more critical towards Pop Art, without completely separating himself from it. Through a narrative multiplicity, typical of the postmodern era that emerged in that period, he re-approaches his subjects, giving them sexual or political impacts, making allusions to details that are often shocking, but without undermining the overall imagination of the work. Thus three periods can be observed in his work, as Alexis Vaillant observes: that of the 70s, the most clearly associated with Pop Art; that of the 80s with the use of slogans and advertising clichés; and the most recent period, so it becomes even more complex with the use of collages and narratives, giving a greater spontaneity to the visual effect. His works are often more reminiscent of punk fanzines than Pop Art, and create in the viewer the dilemma of how to approach them, a dilemma that remains unsolved throughout his work, reviving it as A. Vaillant points out. Many times in his work the titles also have a strong sarcastic tendency, selecting them from various real magazines or books and combining them into the final artistic result, adding yet another creative spark. Stephan Correard will note the effects of Freudian analysis on childhood violence on the artist, as well as the dialectical texture of his works reminiscent of Magritte, with the constant alternation between unbridled imagination and the frequent use of impersonal, mechanical, and objective elements (see “Portrait of the artist as a cockroach” in How To Murder Your Pet, Paris 2022). Erik Verhagen will trace his relationship with abstract expressionism; through the way he covers his surfaces with visual matter (see “Steve Gianakos. Not Mainstream”, in Steve Gianakos, Semiose Editions, Paris 2015, no pagination). Finally, the Greek-American artist and critic Philip Tsiaras (b. 1952) underlines in his review in Arts Magazine that Gianakos’ creatures have frozen faces, consequently they go beyond the merely amusing or funny and engage in penetrating satire, showing us ourselves.

Anestis Melidonis
Art Historian
Scientific Associate of the Hellenic Diaspora Foundation