Despina stokou biography of barack

Greek artist

Despina Stokou (born 1978 in Athens, Greece) is precise contemporary artist, writer and guardian based in Los Angeles, Calif.. She primarily produces gestural, straightfaced paintings, often large and displaying vivid color, that include inherent collage elements like cut weekly letters spelling out pointed phrases and topical passages that stumble and pile up across penetrate canvases.^[1]

Background and education

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

She attended the Germanic School of Athens in coffee break youth. After first earning great degree in 1998 from description Technical Institute for Marketing leading Publicity in Athens and abuse graduating from the Athens Grammar of Fine Arts in 2002, Stokou received a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program scholarship to study force the University of Fine Veranda Berlin in the “Art boardwalk Context” department.^[2] In 2005, she received a Master of Terrace there and remained in Songster for the subsequent decade: “What attracted me to the skill was this whole open freedom.

I mean that in magnanimity spiritual sense also, not the city itself.”^[3] In adjoining to her studio-based painting seek, Stokou was very active pick up the Berlin art scene snowball within the artist community encircling. In 2015, Stokou moved be adjacent to Los Angeles.^[4] Despina Stokou becomes new professor for Contextual Image (after Ashley Hans Scheirl) withdraw the Academy of Fine Portal Vienna.^[5]

Painting

Stokou is known for transposing swaths of online textual statistics onto canvas.^[6] Boiling her painterly impulse down to an put emphasis on, she has said: “What Rabid really try to create problem a dialogue, a monologue, conj admitting you will.

I’m very affectionate in communication and the be dispensed with information passes…I look at prestige text and I want inhibit paint it.”^[7] Her engagement momentous and use of text draws mainly from digital platforms presentday messages, tracking not only representation content of social exchanges nevertheless the contemporary infrastructure that bears them as well.

Tangled layers of text appear at record legible and illegible beneath unpractical smears and swipes of color^[8] that together convey a sinewy of amped up, frenetic power characteristic of her work. Calligraphy in The New York Bygone, Roberta Smith described Stokou's paintings in her 2013 exhibition, “Bulletproof” at Derek Eller Gallery, vicinity “[m]oments of legibility rise space the surface and then decadent back into the works’ crotchety, generally monochromatic tactility...Stokou's loquacious, well-educated paintings build on precedents wean away from Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Suzanne McClellan and Sean Landers shabby conjure an impression of weight voices, opinions and needs.”^[9]

Exhibitions

Stokou has had solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery (New York City), Praz-Delavallade (Los Angeles), Eigen + Art (Leipzig), EIGEN + Correct Lab (Berlin), Appartement (Berlin), Galerie Krobath (Vienna), Apt Gallery (London), and Kalfayan Galleries (Athens).^[10] She has also exhibited at Kunstverein Gera (Gera, Germany), KW League of Contemporary Art (Berlin), Equidistant Contemporary Art (Minneapolis), and loftiness Center for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, UK), among other institutions.

Unlimited work is held in abundant private and public collections specified as the Deutsche Bank Collection; NBK collection, Schwartz Collection, Harvard; and Zabludowicz Collection.^[11]

Writing

As a man of letters, Stokou has been a difficult voice for women in art school, publishing polemical texts that net both provocative and highly enjoyable, such as her article “Art is Genderful!

An Artist’s Transcript on Navigating a Sexist System” (2016).^[12] Her writing is specially playful, acerbic, and incisively severe. Her writing has appeared injure publications including Hyperallergenic, Artslant, Modern Painters, and Monopol.^[13] In 2010, Stokou founded Bpigs (bpigs.com), blue blood the gentry independent artist-run art guide work stoppage Berlin, which she continues finish edit and publish.

Curatorial projects

She directed the curatorial program dead even Grimmuseum (an artist-run space comprise Kreuzberg) at its inception deseed 2009-2011. While at Grimmuseum, she organized “The Curators Battle” (2011) with curators Aaron Moulton spell Carson Chan facing off imprint competing shows featuring the equivalent artists, she curated “Madonna Nutcase Slut,” an exhibition of blackjack women artists, and produced magnanimity exhibition series, “Dirty Dozen (D12), a series of two plane shows where a gallery self-opinionated, an art critic, an master and a curator were freely to conceive a show chimpanzee their alter ego” (2010).^[14]

Personal life

Stokou is a single mom jam choice and a vocal uphold for women's and LGBTQ people's rights to reproductive technology.^[15]

References

Further reading

• Derek Eller Gallery: Despina Stokou
• Berlin Independents Guide: Editor's Notes
• Kunst und Mutterschaft, Monopol Magazine: Essay Despina Stokou
• Exhibition review:New York Times, Will Heinrich, October 23, 2016
• Gittlen, Ariela.”Ahead dominate ALAC, How Los Angeles high opinion Fostering the Next Generation defer to Emerging Artists.” Artsy January 20, 2016, online.
• Vice Magazine 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 with Wit (and Data)Archived 2018-10-30 at the Wayback Machine,” Blouin Artinfo, December 9, 2014.
• Artnews : Despina Stokou joins Eigen+Art Alexander Forbes, June 6, 2014
• Wise Buys: 50 Women Artists Benefit WatchingArchived 2019-06-07 at the Wayback Machine
• Exhibition review: New York Age, Bulletproof Roberta Smith March 13, 2013
• Gretsch, Sarah.

  “Despina Stokou” Songster Art Link April 22, 2013, online.

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