Steve Gianakos was born in New York in 1938. He began his artistic career in the mid-1960s, during the explosion of Pop Art in the USΑ, and studied at the Pratt Institute in New York. His work includes drawings and paintings, hybrid forms composed of photocopied and overpainted collages from magazines and other sources of mass culture. The artist deliberately conceals this handmade method so that the work resembles a poster, thus, the image reappears as a product of American culture. In this way, he deconstructs American pop mass culture, as well as social and artistic stereotypes, and develops a sharp, humorous punk-pop idiom, with influences from Dada. He leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether this is art or not. His works are included in the most important public collections in America: MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Neuberger Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum of Chicago, the University Museum (Berkeley), the collections of the Judith Rothschild Contemporary Foundation and Chase Manhattan Bank, as well as the collections of CNAP in France. He has held over thirty solo exhibitions worldwide in renowned galleries, museums, and art institutions, such as the Guggenheim, PS1 (MoMA), and the Leo Castelli, Marian Goodman, and Barbara Gladstone galleries, and has participated in dozens of group exhibitions with other important American artists (including MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum in New York, and Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht). In 2017, the Musée des Beaux Arts de Dole in France held a major retrospective exhibition of his work. He has been awarded important prizes and scholarships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1995) and the Pollock-Krasner Award (1996).