#Stephen Antonakos

[hellohaters]

Stephen Antonakos

[monogreek]

White Eikonostasio (2003) by Stephen Antonakos (1926-2013)

Art Exhibition: Laconian Artists from the Collection of the National Gallery, Coumantaros Art Gallery, Sparta-Greece.

(ph. Yorgos Yannakos, August 2024)

[joeexclamation]

[uypt]

Stephen Antonakos/ ‘Package to be Opened July 2000’, 1975/ Paper, ink, etc., (2 x 8 x 11 inches) edition 12 of 40

[walkingdetroit]

Art in the Stations: Greektown

After 12 colorful stops, we have reached the end of the loop!

Our 13th and final Art in the Stations destination is the Greektown People Mover. It's been quite a ride!

Connected to Hollywood Casino with an entrance through Trapper's Alley, a former downtown shopping destination, this DPM station features its art outside- and looks best at night!

The primary colors in "Neon for Greektown Station" by Stephen Antonakos is fitting for the vibrant nightlife scene in Greektown, adding excitement and a sense of celebration as you walk down Monroe Street to Beaubien. Arches and free-form neon tubing decorate the overpass, lighting up the night.

Antonakos is a Greek-American sculpture known for his vibrant neon rooms, lighting installations, and colorful works. Since the 1970s, he has installed over 55 permanent Public Works throughout the world.

Although I caught these photos during the day, be sure to check it out when you're in Greektown next for dinner or a drink.

[cosmicanger]

Stephen Antonakos: Pillows

PRESS RELEASE

January 13 – February 24, 2023

Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of Antonakos's Pillow series from the dynamic early Sixties, a period marked by the powerful emergence of both Pop Art and Minimalism. The series was first installed at New York's Byron Gallery in 1964, again at the exhibition organized by Houston's Contemporary Art Museum in 1971 and most recently at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in 2013. This is the artist's sixth solo show with Bookstein Projects.

The gallery is also pleased to announce the forthcoming monograph, Stephen Antonakos: Neon and Geometry, published by Rizzoli with a new essay by David Ebony. The book will be available in the fall of 2023.

From our current perspective, the Pillows may be understood within the long development of European found-object and assemblage traditions, particularly from Miro to Burri and on through to the contemporary work of such great American artists as Bontecou, Rauschenberg, and Chamberlain. The Pillows' other essential context is their creation specifically at the temporal intersection of the emergence of both Pop and Minimalism – nearly simultaneous movements surging in very dissimilar directions.

By the early Sixties Antonakos had left behind his hand-made Constructions and "Sewlages" and was working with non-referential, abstract geometry in neon, his signature medium. Suddenly, unexpectedly, at this pivotal moment there was a detour into a unique series of profoundly personal, nighttime compulsions involving pillows and – once again – found media. Some of the elements are presented "as is" and others are variously painted, manipulated, or even hidden beneath their pillowcases. The rush lasted over a year. Each Pillow reverberates with inner emotional, psychological subtexts. Perhaps more radical than even their most visceral operations is their displacement from human contact and the horizontal to their exposed vertical positions on the wall. This change from private to public recalls Rauschenberg's famous "Bed," but the Pillows have also gone through a lot on the way.

Asked about the "detour" into his distinct and distinctly strange constellation of Pillows, Antonakos said, "It squeezed me, it had me in its grip. I was going somewhere else but it wound me up and pulled me into its coil. I ricocheted from one to the next without rest, without awakening." This does not sound like Antonakos, and the Pillows don't look like Antonakos either – at least not at first. Yet the compelling unconscious force that produced these urgent, almost automatic, handmade objects is upon further consideration quite similar to the unmediated, direct process that has informed his decisions and his hand throughout the more than five decades of neon installations, Panels, and drawings since then.

The intensity and immediacy of these profoundly internal works, for all their tortured, nocturnal content, still show the tender, succinct hand of the artist resisting – with various results – the violent. In the cuts, the bristling areas of nails, the geometric contortions of plumbing pipes, the buttons, rods, and other words and objects revealed or hidden; Antonakos's central formalism can be recognized. For all the vivid yet ambiguous emotional content, these real things in real spaces are shaped not only by internal pressures, but by his natural, deep-seated formal rigor.

[mortuusflores]

Stephen Antonakos (1996)

[steamedtangerine]

The Room by Stephen Antonakos

wood and neon

Grand Rapids, MI

[agresteview]

Stephen Antonakos - Truth, 1995

[thunderstruck9]

Stephen Antonakos (Greek/American, 1926-2013), J #12, 1980. Gouache and pencil on vellum, 17 x 14 in.

[cocosse]

"Language is our body and our breath, our world and our thought, our perception and even our unconscious."

Philippe Sollers * Stephen Antonakos, 1988

[monogreek]

YES (June 7, 1963) by Stephen Antonakos (1926-2013)by

[theleoisallinthemind]

stephen antonakos

[lizpurr]

Stephen Antonakos, Rememberence 

[ninadeez]

Stephen Antonakos

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[jeanbdv]

Stephen Antonakos - installations tumblr           instagram