Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali (Greek: Χρύσα Βαρδέα-Μαυρομιχάλη; born December 31, 1933 in Athens, Greece) is a Greek American artist who works in a wide variety of media. 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.
"Cyryssa retraces her steps", by Amei Wallach, Newsday, 3 February 1991, part ii, p. 17 (section: "This Week, Art")
Dictionary of Women Artists, Volume 1
Chryssa
American sculptor, 1933—
Born in Athens. Greece, 31 December 1933; later naturalised US citizen. Took a bachelor's degree in sociology in Athens, then studied under Greek painter Anghelos Prokopion. Studied at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, 1953-4; California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, 1954-5. Settled in New York, 1955. Exhibited at Documenta, Kassel, Germany, 1968 and 1977. Recipient of Guggenheim fellowship, 1973. Lives in New York.
By 1955. as America enjoyed post-war prosperity, Chryssa had left her homeland, Greece, for Paris and had settled in New York. The effects of this move immediately manifestcd themselves in the artist's work. The influence of American commercial culture became apparent in Cycladic Books (1955; several casts made; private collections, repr. Restany 1977. figs. 3, 55 and 56), where Chryssa poured plaster into a packaging box. The subsequent cast is barely three-dimensional (foreshadowing Minimalism) except for the presence of a T-shaped ridge. This ridge reminded Chryssa of the forms found on ancient Cycladic figures, allowing the work to illustrate the confluence of contemporary American and ancient Greek cultures.
The bright lights and visual language of Manhattan became a dominant source of inspiration for Chryssa's art. In Arrow: Homage to Times Square (1958; Empire State Collection. Albany, NY) Chryssa used small bars of aluminium to form an arrow shape. Each bar casts a shadow, which allowed her to experiment with the "static light" of the piece. In Study of Light (1958; painted aluminium; private collection, ibid., fig.65) she cast a relief that looks like alphabet soup. When the light hitting the work changes, different forms are produced by the letters. Chryssa continued to study the structural potential of lettering in her oil painting Newspaper No.3 (1961; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), which is part of a series exploring patterns in newspapers. By working with such banal subject-matter, she echoed Pop Art's irreverence towards the separation of "popular" culture from "fine" art. She anticipated Warhol's multiple images with Car Tires (1958-62; Harry N. Abrams Family Collection, New York), in which she employed a stamp to repeat the image of a tyre within a grid.
On deciding to work with signboards in the early 1960s, Chryssa apprenticed herself to a sign maker. In Tmes Square Sky (1962; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) she created an unintelligible message by layering decontextualised metal letters on to the wall. To balance the melange, she used blue neon to write the word air above the work. Not only docs this mark the first occurrence of neon in a sculpture (Hunter 1974, p.n), but it also points to Chryssa's strategic use of language. Henceforth, she experimented with the many artistic possibilities of neon. Symbols and letters were analysed via multicoloured neon, as in Five Variations on the Ampersand (1966; Museum of Modern Art, New York). Each ampersand stands over 60 centimetres high and is encased in grey Plexiglas, which creates a night-time effect. Emphasising the processes of the work, and her ability to control them, Chryssa exposed the mechanisms required to operate the neon. This manoeuvre complemented her claim that her sculptures are not dependent on technology, because they remain complete even after the transformers break down (ibid., p.12).
In preparation for her Gates to Times Square, Chryssa produced a scries of neon studies, most of which became individual works of art. Although Clytemnestra II (moulded plastic tubes wiih inserted neon and timer; Nationalgalerie, Berlin) began as study No.14, this neon S, 4.57 metres high, caused a sensation when it was exhibited at Documenta IV in 1968. Unusually expressive, the work was inspired by Irene Papas's portrayal of Clytemnestra in Euripides' tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis. As Chryssa relates, when the protagonist learned of her daughter's sacrifice, the curves of her body convoluted as she screamed in horror (Restany 1977. p.69) The escalating sound of anguish is visually echoed by the sculpture, which requires several timed sequences before the boldly coloured neon is completely perceivable.
Combining the knowledge gained through her studies with her interest in the city, Chryssa started to build the Gates to Times Square (1964-6; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo). As she has stated: "America is very stimulating, intoxicating for me ... The vulgarity of America as seen in the lights of Times Square is poetic" (Hunter 1974, p. 10). For two years of intense activity, she worked to integrate metal, signs, neon and plastic into a three-metre cube that pays homage to communication, advertising and hence to the visual mechanics of capitalism. Art and technology unite in order to produce a light that is now dynamic. At both the entrance and the exit stands a giant letter A, which provides structural and symbolic support to the jumble of unreadable signs. Thus, what might be understood as chaotic, becomes logical (poetic) in form.
Works of the early 1970s are dominated by a triptych that furthers the analysis of linguistic codes. In one segment entitled That's All (1970-73; Flexiglas, neon, electrodes, asbestos, paper; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Chryssa employed coloured neon to draw fragmented letters. The result, suggests Restany, is purely gestural, for the meaning of the fractured letters is suppressed by the visuality of the irregular lines. Although the triptych contains neon tubing and cut-aluminium shapes the two-dimensionality of the work is emphasised through fields of colour. This graphic aesthetic reappears in a commission Chryssa received to transform the interior of a castle, known as the Metternich Project (1973-89; Schloss Adelslebon, Germany). After eliminating all natural light from the space, she recreated the exterior landscape by fabricating the passage of time. Cool blue and white neon is superimposed over warm yellows and foggy, grey-coloured paint to evoke the sensation of evening and daylight. The synthetic environment is then brought to life by a timer that moves the neon to a slow rhythm.
Chryssa continued to explore the use of language and light in New York. In addition to Times Square, she was newly inspired by Chinatown. Throughout the 1980s she produced paintings and large wall reliefs based on Chinese calligraphy and Roman script, as in Mott Street No.2 (1985; sheet metal, mixed media, metallic paint; artist's collection, repr. Chryssa: Cityscapes 1990, fig. 14). Instead of neon, she relied on aluminium to convey the structural qualities of the Chinese characters, while the highly polished surfaces reflect the surrounding light independently. By the 1990s Chryssa had returned to the topic of time with Summer (1988-90; honeycomb aluminium, paint, neon; artist's collection. repr. Wallach 1991). This complex sculpture, however, does not refer to the "natural" season, but rather, Vivaldi's musical construction.
Light, form. language and culture remain the constant themes in Chryssa's diverse work. Yet her concerns extend beyond that of the formal. By exploring language, she repossesses a domain once considercd "masculine." Moreover, when she connotes the artificiality of "nature," she is actually questioning the prcsumption of an inherent "female" nature. Indeed, Chryssa may be seen as an overt feminist in the scream of Clytemnestra but, more subtly, she repeatedly contradicts theories of essentialism with her gender-neutral art. Quite often, the only way one could ascertain that Chryssa is a woman artist is by her unjust lack of art-historical recognition.