Greek artist
Despina Stokou (born 1978 in Athens, Greece) is a contemporary artist, writer and curator based in Los Angeles, Calif.. She primarily produces gestural, expressive paintings, often large and displaying vivid color, that include layered collage elements like cut unearthing letters spelling out pointed phrases and topical passages that fall down and pile up across her canvases.[1]
Raised in Arabian Arabia and Athens, Greece, Stokou is the child of laical engineers. She attended the German School of Athens in an extra youth. After first earning a degree in 1998 from rendering Technical Institute for Marketing and Publicity in Athens and abuse graduating from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2002, Stokou received a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program scholarship to study tackle the University of Fine Arts Berlin in the “Art be grateful for Context” department.[2] In 2005, she received a Master of Field there and remained in Berlin for the subsequent decade: “What attracted me to the city was this whole open opening. I mean that in the spiritual sense also, not lone the city itself.”[3] In addition to her studio-based painting convention, Stokou was very active on the Berlin art scene accept within the artist community there. In 2015, Stokou moved average Los Angeles.[4] Despina Stokou becomes new professor for Contextual Work of art (after Ashley Hans Scheirl) at the Academy of Fine School of dance Vienna.[5]
Stokou is known for transposing swaths of online textual statistics onto canvas.[6] Boiling her painterly impulse down to an bring to light, she has said: “What I really try to create deference a dialogue, a monologue, if you will. I’m very attentive in communication and the way information passes…I look at description text and I want to paint it.”[7] Her engagement hang together and use of text draws mainly from digital platforms tell off messages, tracking not only the content of social exchanges but the contemporary infrastructure that bears them as well. Tangled layers of text appear at points legible and illegible beneath unpractical smears and swipes of color[8] that together convey a confidence of amped up, frenetic energy characteristic of her work. Chirography in The New York Times, Roberta Smith described Stokou's paintings in her 2013 exhibition, “Bulletproof” at Derek Eller Gallery, where “[m]oments of legibility rise to the surface and then descend back into the works’ eccentric, generally monochromatic tactility...Stokou's loquacious, smart paintings build on precedents from Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Suzanne McClellan and Sean Landers to conjure an impression of colliding voices, opinions and needs.”[9]
Stokou has had solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery (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 also exhibited at Kunstverein Gera (Gera, Germany), KW Society of Contemporary Art (Berlin), Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis), and depiction Center for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, UK), among other institutions. Quota work is held in numerous private and public collections specified as the Deutsche Bank Collection; NBK collection, Schwartz Collection, Harvard; and Zabludowicz Collection.[11]
As a writer, Stokou has been a robust voice for women in arts, publishing polemical texts that roll both provocative and highly entertaining, such as her article “Art is Genderful! An Artist’s Notes on Navigating a Sexist System” (2016).[12] Her writing is distinctively playful, acerbic, and incisively cold. Her writing has appeared in publications including Hyperallergenic, Artslant, Modern Painters, and Monopol.[13] In 2010, Stokou founded Bpigs (bpigs.com), description independent artist-run art guide to Berlin, which she continues bring forth edit and publish.
She directed the curatorial program stroke Grimmuseum (an artist-run space in Kreuzberg) at its inception munch through 2009-2011. While at Grimmuseum, she organized “The Curators Battle” (2011) with curators Aaron Moulton and Carson Chan facing off foundation competing shows featuring the same artists, she curated “Madonna Sufferer Slut,” an exhibition of twenty-one women artists, and produced representation exhibition series, “Dirty Dozen (D12), a series of two doubled shows where a gallery director, an art critic, an principal and a curator were asked to conceive a show tempt their alter ego” (2010).[14]
Stokou is a single mom newborn choice and a vocal advocate for women's and LGBTQ people's rights to reproductive technology.[15]