Installation view: "Antonakos: 1977-1978, Cuts and a Wall," Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, February 19 - March 21, 2015. Stephen Antonakos, Four Blue Incomplete Neon Circles, 1977, Neon, Dimensions variable, Ideal dimensions: 11 x 12 feet. (BP#SA-7090) Image courtesy of Stephen Antonakos Studio LLC and Bookstein Projects, New York. Photo: Etienne Frossard, New York.
Dr. Helen C. Evans, Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine Art at the Metropolitan Museum, and Robert Storr, artist, curator, and critic, will discuss Byzantine manifestations found throughout six decades of Greek-American artist Stephen Antonakos’s work. We will see many series of projected images illustrating both the Modernist and the Byzantine aspects of his art.
Stephen Antonakos (Greece, November 1, 1926 — New York, August 17, 2013) started using neon around 1960, always in abstract forms, at vastly different scales and with various material combinations. His practice has lent the medium new perceptual and formal meanings in hundreds of gallery and museum shows in New York and internationally. His use of spare, complete and incomplete geometric neon forms has ranged from linear and 3-D indoor installations to painted Neon Canvases, Walls, Panels with painted or gold surfaces, Rooms, and Chapels. Drawing and collage also were constant practices. His work is included in major international collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens.
The evening will commence with a piano concert by modernist musician Idith Meshulam Korman. She will perform piano pieces by the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas, as an introduction to the conceptual connections between Skalkottas’s compositions and Antonakos’s work.
For more information please contact the gallery at info@booksteinprojects.com or by telephone at (212) 750-0949