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Stephen Antonakos and Andrzej Nowicki at Antonakos’ New York studio, 2008.

Stephen Antonakos was born in Aglos Nikolas, a mountain village in Laconia, Greece in 1926. The family moved to New York in 1930 and settled near the Greek Orthodox Holy Trinity Cathedral on east 74th street. Antonakos began to draw at a young age, and after serving in the Pacific in 1945, he returned to the USA and enrolled in the art department at Brooklyn Community College.

His first artworks involved collage, fabric, appliqué and embroidery. By the early 1950s he was introducing found objects into the collages, a practice that arose from a desire that the work be experienced as “real things in the real world”, and not representation. By 1956 he had abandoned easel painting, and moved his studio to West 39th street in the fur district. The abundance of discarded fabrics in the streets led to the creation of the “sewlages” (sewn fabric collages) in the early 1960s.

Antonakos began exhibiting in New York with the likes of Lee Bontecou, Yves Klein and Claes Oldenburg in the early 1960s. He introduced neon into the work in 1960, using neon tubing and electricity inspired by street signage. Neon quickly became his preferred medium and he pushed the scale of the works into the public domain with site-specific neon projects on an architectural scale.

Antonakos’s neon sculptures and installations were first exhibited in American museums in the late 1960s, accompanied by preparatory drawings and, by 1977, he was invited to participate in Dokumenta 6 in Germany where he exhibited a fifty-foot red neon, titled Incomplete Neon Square.

Antonakos represented the US in the 19th Sao Paulo Biennale, 1987, and Greece in the 47th Venice biennale in 1997. His work is exhibited internationally and in the world’s best museums including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Greek National Gallery, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Now in his eighth decade, Antonakos continues to work daily in his West Broadway studio and home in New York. He is prolific, producing beautiful minimal drawings on mylar paper, and works on paper that suggest relief sculpture or carved drapery, made by simply crumpling the paper sheet, alongside the neon panels and public works. During the past fifteen years, Antonakos’s work has shifted slightly to emphasise his spiritual ties to the Greek Orthodox church. Religious icons are referenced through neon back lighting creating an ethereal glow, or gold leaf rubbed onto the panels.

Antonakos opens a solo show at David Krut Projects, New York on September the 17th 2008. It is an honour to work with this esteemed artist who is world renowned for the major role he has played in the evolution of light art since the 1960s. The show will present three neon works, a series of drawings and works on paper, and two early studies for sculpture. An exterior neon sculpture will be on display in the Jim Kempner Gallery sculpture court on West 23rd street in conjunction with the David Krut Projects exhibition. Antonakos’s recent retrospective mounted by the Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece’s national gallery, will open in the Allentown Art Museum on September the 28th. David Krut Publishing will publish an artist’s book to accompany the exhibition.

Fuschia coloured pencil on vellum, 14 x 11″, 2008

Keywords: Andrzej Nowicki, David-Krut-Projects, New York, Stephen-Antonakos