About the artist
1926 - 2013. Stephen Antonakos was born in 1926 in Agios Nikolaos, Laconia. In 1930, he settled with his family in New York where he lived and worked. He has been recognized since the early 1960s for his spare and spatial neon work and his extensive practice of drawings. A strict abstractionist, he characterized his work as "real things in real space" -- direct visual and spatial experience with no illusions, allusions, or references outside the art itself. Along with his major painted or gold-leaf Panels with colored neon light behind their edges and his works on paper and vellum, he is known for his Walls, Meditation Rooms, Chapels, and Artist's Books. For more than four decades he exhibited extensively in New York and throughout the United States, Greece and Europe. Since the late 1970s more than 45 of his large-scale permanent Public Works have been installed in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Irving Sandier's monograph ANTONAKOS was published in 1999 by Hudson Hills Press. In 2007 a retrospective exhibition of his work was presented in Athens, under the title ANTONAKOS: A RETROSPECTIVE. He died in New York in 2013.
About the exhibition
Antonakos's non-objective art has a strong minimalist character and an architectural presence. In the 1960s, he was among the first to use neon as a new material in sculpture. Antonakos has developed a vocabulary based on the dynamic tension between complete and incomplete geometric forms as well as vibrant colors. The dynamic configurations of geometric planes create sensations of motion and depth. In the exhibition at Citronne Gallery, through the presentation of neon, paintings, drawings, and sculptures-models, we aim to investigate the intermedium dialogue of his work as well as the conceptual development of his ideas.