ART-PRESENTATION: Who’s Afraid of Steve Gianakos?
Steve Gianakos draws his forms with crisp lines that bring to mind the simplicity of minimalism. Appropriating the iconic style of 1950’s children books, Steve Gianakos aim at the politically correct values of puritan America and finds great pleasure in watching them explode in our faces through his joyfully provocative collages, which sometimes seem more Punk than Pop.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole Archive
The exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Steve Gianakos?” at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole brings together around 80 paintings and works on paper, created between 1980 and the present day. It is a retrospective, enabling everyone to discover the artist’s work, its coherence and at the same time the variety of different pathways in terms of form, artistic technique, iconography and intellect that he has continued to explore to the present day. At the mid-60s Gianakos began to exhibit his early drawings in the US and it was at the very center of the Pop Art explosion on one hand and the remarkable appearance of Minimal Art on the other, that he developed his artistic language and universe. His work cobbles together different elements, poaches from others, touches every aspect of art while respecting nothing, pillages Picasso, Dada and Surrealism as well as comics and illustrations from children’s books from the ‘50s. The artist cuts out, photocopies, glues, paints, draws and generally mistreats his objects and figures, which are full of holes, with their throats cut and bodies dismembered to be glued back together, head over heels. Shamelessly, Gianakos exhibits sexualized and lascivious bodies used and abused in an ambiance of sex and drugs without the rock ‘n’ roll but with pin-up girls sniffing coke, women with aggressive bomb-like breasts, men dressed up as little girls, serpents, lizards snails and other crawling creatures, slithering into any gap or orifice available… From the clean lines of his paintings from 1970-80, to the photocopied collages that he produced in great number over the following years, his drawing remains precise and his brush-stroke sober, even as the compositions become more absurd, overlapping with no respect for proportion, like a cascade of exquisite cadavers. With a perfect sense of freedom, Steve Gianakos has since the end of the ‘60s invented a universe close to that of Pop Art, nourished by popular culture and comic books, yet far too trashy, erotic and bloody to be simply tidied away under the label of American Pop Art. He plays with falsely naïve images, sometimes borrowed from children’s publications, sometimes from “adults only” comics, flirting with a kind of perversity, which is often restated obsessively. He also works in series: The sequence of “Chubby Boy” and “Chubby Girl” show off his taste for the trivial whereas the “Dead paintings” series plays on death and is continued through the numerous decapitated heads and figures undergoing metamorphosis of his recent works on paper and paintings. Shapes, figures, faces, breasts, mouths and costumes are transplanted from one image, from one oeuvre to another through the use of collage, recycling and ceaseless re-invention, while constructing a universe that is both totally coherent and unique.
Info: Curator: Amélie Lavin, Director, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, 85 rue des Arènes, Dole, Duration: 16/6-24/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-12:00 & 14:00-18:00, www.musees-franchecomte.com
