Steve Gianakos

Steve Gianakos is a painter who gained popularity in the 1960s during the height of the Pop Art era. Gianakos studied at the Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Memphis Academy of Arts, and North Texas State University.

His mixed media works and acrylic paintings assume the iconic style of 1950's children's books, rendering cartoon-like characters with minimal, black lines. The assumed innocence of these figures is juxtaposed with the provocative, hyperbolic, humorous, and sometimes sexually explicit nature of his work. His work provokes an exploration of the themes of the mass hysteria that accompanied the pursuit of the “American dream” and the stereotypes of consumer society. "His geometric inter-framing both leads the eye into the scene while also disorienting it. Harnessing the grotesque both formally and contextually, Gianakos finds a way to astonishingly marry the two." [1]

He began his artist residency at Artpark in 1974 where he created Model for Dead Chair. Since then, he has exhibited over 50 times in both solo and group shows all over the United States and abroad. His works are found in museum collections including the Guggenheim, MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum of Chicago, the New York State Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York.

He lives and works in both New York, NY, and Crete, Greece.

[1] https://www.thegreekfoundation.com/art/the-sarcastic-imagery-of-steve-gianakos