Acclaimed Greek-American artist Stephen Antonakos passed away at the age of 87 in New York.
Antonakos was born in St Nicholas in southern Greece, “up in the mountains and hard to locate exactly, ” as he put it. He moved with his family to New York in 1930.
In the early 1960’s, after working onĀ different types of collage, while he worked in an advertising agency during the day to earn his living, he began making pillows on which buttons were sewn. On one of his pillows he used a neon tube which spelled out the word “dream.”
By 1965 neon became his only medium. The early examples had timers which were switched on and off, but Antonakos discovered that viewers would not watch long enough to follow the complete program.
Unlike Flavin’s fluorescent components, they are not standardized items, but custom-made for the artist. In the late 1990’s onwards, Antonakos tended to use neon for its glow rather than as an object, placing it behind a painting. He had also designed a number of chapels.
Moreover, he made packages, artist’s books, and reliefs of white wood and of silver. There have been over 100 one-person shows including a recent 50-year retrospective seen in Greece and the United States, more than 250 group shows, and over 50 public works installed in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
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