Chryssa
1933 - 2013
Born in Athens (GR), died in Athens (GR).
Chryssa
Studies at Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris (1953-54) and at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts (1954-55). Immediately after her studies, she moves to New York. She practices sculpture. During the course of her artistic oeuvre, she experiments with various construction techniques and materials such as plaster, metal, plexiglass, neon etc. At first she creates wall-mounted syntheses comprising plaster or metal on a white background. Her experimentations with plaster lead her to create the series Cycladic Books. The artist pours wet plaster onto paper trading boxes and when it has dried she removes the paper box. During the period 1955-60, she creates metal or plaster plaques upon which she engraves letters or symbols which alternate with blank spaces and refer to antiquity’s monumental epigraphs. At the end of the Fifties she begins to create paintings inspired by the structure and order of newspaper pages.
In the early Sixties she moves from the paintings-newspapers to sculptures, for which she uses moulds, experimenting with the different kinds of structural arrangements that can occur on a newspaper page. In the early Sixties, she incorporates neon into her work, a staple element in her oeuvre from now on. Charmed by the lights and lit signboards that dominate New York at the time, she uses neon to construct a series of sculptures, the supreme example being The Gates to Times Square, that graced New York’s Times Square. The artist’s frequent visits to New York’s China Town provides inspiration for a new series of paintings, realised at the end of the Seventies, and a series of wall-mounted relief works, which she starts to create in the early Eighties, inspired by Chinese calligraphy.
The period of 1992-94 is spent in Athens where she creates a series of sculptural syntheses which are accompanied by recorded sounds of the city. In 2007 she moves to Greece.
She has presented her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions (e.g. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Whitney Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, National Gallery, Athens et al.) and also group exhibitions in Greece and abroad (Sao Paulo Biennale, 1963, 1969, 1991, Documenta, Kassel, 1968, Venice Biennale, 1972 et al.).