Chryssa (Vardea-Mavromichali) (1933 – 2013) was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media.
Chryssa comes from a famous powerful family from the Deep Mani. She herself has said, "I do not come from a rich family [but from] a family with good education (for example, one of my sisters studied medicine) and good exposure to the creative arts": This sister, for instance, was a friend of Greek poet and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis.
An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture widely known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she has always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and has been working since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.
Chryssa began painting while she was still an adolescent, and on the advice of a leading art critic in Greece, her family sent her to Paris to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in 1953-54. She was barely twenty-one when she sailed to New York. "I had an enormous curiosity about America and I felt that it would be much easier in America to achieve a freedom of expression rather than in European countries."
Chryssa, best known for her "Luminist" sculpture in brilliantly colored neon tubing, was born in Greece and now ranks as one of the outstanding and innovative artists in America today.
Soon after her arrival in the early 1950's, Chryssa discovered the neo-Byzantine world of Time Square and its lights. She also found inspiration in the newspaper for which the Square is named. Her Early "Newspaper" paintings and sculptures were innovative experiments using typography, newsprint collages, metal molds, and alphabetical forms in raised relief. The luminous mythology of Times Square, its giant glowing and blinking signs and letters fascinated Chryssa.
The impact was overwhelming as she associated the dazzling imagery of the Square's neon signs to the art of Byzantium. The references she uses to indicate the breadth of her discovery are highly significant "I saw Times Square with its light and letters, and I realized it was as beautiful and difficult to do as Japanese calligraphy... In Times Square the sky is like the gold of Byzantine mosaics or icons. It comes and goes in the foreground instead of remaining in the background." These signs were ultimately transformed by the artist into her own mysterious symbols and alphabetical elements expressing, as she put it, the "Homeric wisdom" of the signs.
Chryssa's genius is expressed in a variety of mediums, ranging from sensitive arrangements of calligraphic elements in plaster and metal to the luminous, and equally disciplined, neon works. Her work lifts the anthropology of our world to its greatest height.
Chryssa has had individual and collective exhibition shows at the Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney -New York. Harvard University; Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; Carnegie Institute among many others.
1957
Chryssa's first major work was The Cycladic Books, a series of plaster reliefs which the French art critic Pierre Restany described as having produced "the purified and stylized geometric relief which is characteristic of Cycladic sculpture."
According to the American art historian and critic Barbara Rose, The Cycladic Books preceded American minimalism by seventeen years.
1958
Arrow: Homage to Times Square is a large 8 ft by 8 ft (2.4 m) work in painted cast aluminum. In a 2005 interview in Vouliagmeni, Chryssa said of this work: "I only ever kept one work for more than 15 years in my studio, "The Arrow" – it is now in Albany, in the Rockefeller Collection."
1961
Chryssa's first solo exhibition was mounted at The Guggenheim.
1962
Times Square Sky is a 5 ft × 5 ft (1.5 m) × 9.5 in work in neon, aluminum and steel. It is now in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
1963
Chryssa's work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art[18] in curator Dorothy Canning Miller's Americans 1963 exhibition. The artists who were represented in the show also included Richard Anuszkiewicz, Lee Bontecou, Robert Indiana, Richard Lindner, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, Ad Reinhardt, James Rosenquist, and others.
1966
The Gates to Times Square, regarded as "one of the most important American sculptures of all time" and "a thrilling homage to the living American culture of advertising and mass communications," is a 10 ft cube installation of two huge letter As through which visitors may walk into "a gleaming block of stainless steel and Plexiglas that seems to quiver in the play of pale blue neon light" which is controlled by programmed timers. First shown in Manhattan's Pace Gallery, it was given to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York in 1972.
1967–1968
Clytemnestra is in the Corcoran Gallery of Art collection in Washington, D.C.[4] It is based on the anguish of Clytemnestra, upon learning that her daughter would be sacrificed by Agamemnon,[21] as portrayed by Chryssa's friend Irene Papas in the Michael Cacoyannis production of Iphigeneia at Aulis on Broadway.[12] This work, or another version of it, has also been installed outside the Megaron Concert Hall (compare megaron) in Athens.
1972
The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a solo exhibition of works by Chryssa.
That's All (early 1970s), the central panel of a triptych related to The Gates of Times Square, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art between 1975 and 1979.
1973
Chryssa's solo exhibition at the Gallerie Denise René was reviewed for TIME magazine by art critic Robert Hughes before it went on to the Galleries Denise René in Düsseldorf and Paris.
1980
Chryssa's 70 ft (21 m) Untitled Light Sculpture, six large Ws connected by cables and programmed electronically to create changing patterns of light through 900 feet of neon tubing, is suspended in the atrium of 33 West Monroe, a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design and its former headquarters, in Chicago, Illinois.
1983
Mott Street, named for Mott Street in Chinatown, Manhattan, is a large work in dark aluminium and red-toned neon light which is installed in the Evangelismos station of the Athens Metro.
Other works by Chryssa in composite honeycomb aluminum and neon in the 1980s and 1990s include Chinatown, Siren, Urban Traffic, and Flapping Birds.
1990
Chryssa 60/90 retrospective exhibition in Athens in the Mihalarias Art Center. After her long absence from Greece, a major exhibition including large aluminum sculptures - cityscapes, "neon boxes" from the Gates to the Times Square, paintings, drawings etc. was held in Athens.
1992
In 1992, after closing her SoHo studio, which art dealer Leo Castelli had described as "one of the loveliest in the world," Chryssa returned to Greece. She found a derelict cinema which had become a storeroom stacked with abandoned school desks and chairs, behind the old Fix Brewery near the city center in Neos Kosmos, Athens. Using the desks to construct enormous benches, she converted the space into a studio for working on designs and aluminum composite honeycomb sculptures. The Athens National Museum of Contemporary Art, which was founded in 2000 and owns Chryssa's Cycladic Books, is in the process of converting the Fix Brewery into its permanent premises.
