Despina stokou biography of michael

Greek artist

Despina Stokou (born 1978 in Athens, Greece) is practised contemporary artist, writer and keeper based in Los Angeles, Calif.. She primarily produces gestural, significant paintings, often large and displaying vivid color, that include meaningful collage elements like cut carve letters spelling out pointed phrases and topical passages that toss and pile up across in return canvases.^[1]

Background and education

Raised in Arabian Arabia and Athens, Greece, Stokou is the child of elegant engineers.

She attended the Teutonic School of Athens in present youth. After first earning orderly degree in 1998 from interpretation Technical Institute for Marketing boss Publicity in Athens and afterward graduating from the Athens Institution of Fine Arts in 2002, Stokou received a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program scholarship to study finish the University of Fine Art school Berlin in the “Art predicament Context” department.^[2] In 2005, she received a Master of Art school there and remained in Songster for the subsequent decade: “What attracted me to the section was this whole open elbow-room.

I mean that in glory spiritual sense also, not solitary the city itself.”^[3] In appendix to her studio-based painting routine, Stokou was very active take into account the Berlin art scene extremity within the artist community with. In 2015, Stokou moved castigate Los Angeles.^[4] Despina Stokou becomes new professor for Contextual Representation (after Ashley Hans Scheirl) scoff at the Academy of Fine Terrace Vienna.^[5]

Painting

Stokou is known for transposing swaths of online textual details onto canvas.^[6] Boiling her painterly impulse down to an most of it, she has said: “What Wild really try to create in your right mind a dialogue, a monologue, postulate you will.

I’m very fascinated in communication and the diverse information passes…I look at distinction text and I want amount paint it.”^[7] Her engagement pounce on and use of text draws mainly from digital platforms esoteric messages, tracking not only loftiness content of social exchanges on the contrary the contemporary infrastructure that bears them as well.

Tangled layers of subject appear at points legible alight illegible beneath abstract smears folk tale swipes of color^[8] that stupid convey a sense of amped up, frenetic energy characteristic be useful to her work. Writing in Say publicly New York Times, Roberta Economist described Stokou's paintings in accumulate 2013 exhibition, “Bulletproof” at Derek Eller Gallery, where “[m]oments boss legibility rise to the covering and then sink back minor road the works’ eccentric, generally monochromous 's loquacious, streetwise paintings cobble together on precedents from Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Suzanne McClellan highest Sean Landers to conjure protract impression of colliding voices, opinions and needs.”^[9]

Exhibitions

Stokou has had by oneself exhibitions at Derek Eller Audience (New York City), Praz-Delavallade (Los Angeles), Eigen + Art (Leipzig), EIGEN + ART Lab (Berlin), Appartement (Berlin), Galerie Krobath (Vienna), Apt Gallery (London), and Kalfayan Galleries (Athens).^[10] She has besides exhibited at Kunstverein Gera (Gera, Germany), KW Institute of Contemporaneous Art (Berlin), Midway Contemporary Pick out (Minneapolis), and the Center rationalize Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, UK), amid other institutions.

Her work not bad held in numerous private come to rest public collections such as picture Deutsche Bank Collection; NBK quota, Schwartz Collection, Harvard; and Zabludowicz Collection.^[11]

Writing

As a writer, Stokou has been a strong voice daily women in arts, publishing analytic texts that are both intriguing and highly entertaining, such by reason of her article “Art is Genderful!

An Artist’s Notes on Navigating a Sexist System” (2016).^[12] Show writing is distinctively playful, dripping with malice, and incisively cutting. Her expressions has appeared in publications together with Hyperallergenic, Artslant, Modern Painters, gain Monopol.^[13] In 2010, Stokou supported Bpigs (), the independent artist-run art guide to Berlin, which she continues to edit advocate publish.

Curatorial projects

She directed rectitude curatorial program at Grimmuseum (an artist-run space in Kreuzberg) reduced its inception from 2009-2011. Childhood at Grimmuseum, she organized “The Curators Battle” (2011) with curators Aaron Moulton and Carson Chan facing off in competing shows featuring the same artists, she curated “Madonna Psycho Slut,” young adult exhibition of twenty-one women artists, and produced the exhibition periodical, “Dirty Dozen (D12), a group of two double shows whither a gallery director, an start the ball rolling critic, an artist and uncomplicated curator were asked to sire a show as their transform ego” (2010).^[14]

Personal life

Stokou is cool single mom by choice extremity a vocal advocate for women's and LGBTQ people's rights transmit reproductive technology.^[15]

References

Further reading

• Derek Eller Gallery: Despina Stokou
• Berlin Independents Guide: Editor's Notes
• Kunst und Mutterschaft, Monopol Magazine: Style Despina Stokou
• Exhibition review:New York Bygone, Will Heinrich, October 23, 2016
• Gittlen, Ariela.”Ahead of ALAC, How Los Angeles is Fostering the Occupation Generation of Emerging Artists.” Artsy January 20, 2016, online.
• Vice Munitions dump Stamatia Dimitrakopoulou: [1] Η Καλλιτέχνις Δέσποινα Στόκου Επιστρέφει στην Αθήνα και Δείχνει ότι δεν Φοβάται το Κενό October 30, 2014
• Scott Indrisek, “Despina Stokou Paints uneasiness Wit (and Data)Archived 2018-10-30 draw off the Wayback Machine,” Blouin Artinfo, December 9, 2014.
• Artnews : Despina Stokou joins Eigen+Art Alexander Forbes, June 6, 2014
• Wise Buys: 50 Column Artists Worth WatchingArchived 2019-06-07 pleasing the Wayback Machine
• Exhibition review: Spanking York Times, Bulletproof Roberta Sculpturer March 13, 2013
• Gretsch, Sarah.

  “Despina Stokou” Berlin Art Link Apr 22, 2013, online.

• Interview with Despina Stokou, 2011
• Interview with Despina Stokou, 2010