Steve Gianakos engages in an attractive and provocative imagery, in which the narration refers to the era of โinnocenceโ of the 50โs and 60โs. In his work he mocks the mass hysteria that accompanied the pursuit of the โAmerican dreamโ and the stereotypes that follow the development of the consumer society.
He draws his forms with crisp lines that bring to mind the simplicity of minimalism. In his work the formalist rigor is found together with a pretentious vulgarity. Appropriating the iconic style of 1950โs children books, Gianakosโ characters assume a basic innocence that belies their hyperbolic actions. Working with only stark black lines, Gianakos delivers his punch straight up. His geometric inter-framing both leads the eye into the scene while also disorienting it. Harnessing the grotesque both formally and contextually, Gianakos finds a way to astonishingly marry the two.
He is one of the key figures in pop art in the USA who has recently participated in the group show โDisturbing Innocenceโ curated by Eric Fischl at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York and previously at “Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration” at MoMA New York. His work has been included many times in major exhibitions curated by important museum persons, such as Robert Rosenblum and Robert Storr and it often attracts reviews by art critics in the international press, such as โArt in Americaโ, โThe New York Timesโ, โArt Forumโ etc. His works are found in permanent museum collections like the Guggenheim, MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum of Chicago, the New York State Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York.
In 2015 he participated at the โ2015 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Artsโ organized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.
