Tria (Three)
Antonakos Stephen (1926-2013)
1996 | 177 x 320 x 25 cm
Neon, metal, color
Museum of Contemporary Art
MCA.MMCA.C133
Donation of the artist
ARTWORK DETAILS
Type: Installation
Subject: Composition, Contemporary art
ARTWORK DESCRIPTION
The installation by Stephen Antonakos consists of three basic forms: the line, the circle, and the angle. According to the artist himself, he chose these three favorite forms and his most basic colors - green, blue, and red - and combined them with neon lighting to provide a natural connection to time, day, and night for the sculpture. He selected this specific composition for the entrance of the then Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, now MOMus - Museum of Contemporary Art, for three reasons, as he notes: "for its morphological characteristics, its function, and its symbolism." "The door, the entrance to a space, represents a place of exchanges: it represents the critical point between 'inside' and 'outside' of a structure, just as our body is the boundary between our inner life and our experience of the world around us." Furthermore, he titled the specific sculpture "THREE" in honor of the three elements that he always hopes his work will have: "...the correctness of the art itself, the open mind of the viewer, and (the most exciting) the flow of energy between them within the space they share."
CREATOR
Steven Antonakos was born in 1926 in Agios Nikolaos in Laconia and in 1930 he moved with his family to New York. From an early age he was involved in painting and the visual arts and attended classes at Brooklyn Community College (1947-1949). In the 1950s, he first worked with collage and then turned to experimenting on objects he found at random, applying variations of color, schematic and stylistic designs. In the 1960s he incorporated neon light tubes into his works, being one of the first artists to establish the use of neon as an artistic medium, which became a characteristic element of his work. His artistic work includes large-scale installations, architectural interventions indoors and outdoors, sculptural constructions, drawings and prints, artist books, meditation rooms, etc. He has presented his work in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions all over the world, and has also participated in international exhibitions. His works adorn public spaces in various cities in America, Europe and Asia and can still be found in public and private collections in the USA and Europe. He has received dozens of awards for his artistic contributions.