Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Theodoros Stamos
American (1922-1997)
INFINITY FIELD, LEFKATA SERIES #I (1971)
polymer with oil on paper
32.625” x 24.625”

STYLE: ABSTRACT-EXPRESSIONISM

  

Theodoros Stamos was one of the youngest members of the original Abstract Expressionists working in New York City in the 1940s and 50s. His interest in nature, Surrealism, primitive arts and Asian Mysticism helped him to synthesize a non-representational language, which he emphasized with subtle gradations of color and form. His canvases often have a grainy, atmospheric surface with muted colors and calligraphic configurations.

The Infinity Field series dominated Stamos’ mature work. The muted fields of color and soft edges are typical of the artist’s predominant painting style.
Stamos, the child of Greek immigrants, was awarded a scholarship to American Artists’ School, where he studied sculpture with Simon Kennedy and Joseph Konzal. His work has been exhibited throughout the world, and can be found in major museum collections such as the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Marina Lambraki-Plaka, National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 1996
In Stamos' paintings the vibrant pictorial surface, the rich and brilliant colour lay bare the palimpsest poetics of the work: the successive strata of colour starting from the dark and opaque and ending in thin and transparent layers that create the perennially moving feeling of the bottom. The light, combined with colour, seems to emerge from the painting's depth. The surface acquires a limited depth: that of its breath. Could it be the nostalgia of the Ionian seashore that animates his compositions with iridescent blues and purples, with blazing sunsets of reds and oranges? In any case, Odysseus was bound to rediscover his island, Lefkas, that faces Ithaca. There he would build the house of his homecoming, and from 1972 on he would share his creative time between his two homelands.
In his mature works his links with recognizable reality are more tenuous. Abstract forms and artistic signs are dynamically balanced; they are never static within the immense spaces that give the impression of extending beyond the limits of the frame, as suggested by the title of a large category of works: "Infinity Fields". After his first painful pilgrimage to Greece in 1948, to a Greece torn apart by Civil war, Stamos, according to the critic Kenneth Sawyer "recaptured the spirit of the Mysteries, the pantheism of his childhood; it was there, too, in the silver light of the Aegean, that the love for clear, vibrant color was fully awakened. It is amusing to note that subsequently his synonym for whatever was clear, warm, or brilliant was "Greek". Greece as legend, place and history occupied increasingly more space in the painter's imaginary landscape, generating a new repertory and a new expression.”
Roberta Smith, New York Times, 2/4/97
“During the 1940's, Mr. Stamos supported his painting by running a small frame shop on East 18th Street in Manhattan where his customers included such artists as Arshile Gorky and Fernand Leger. He had his first solo show in New York at the Wakefield Gallery/Bookshop, run by Betty Parsons, who would later become a prominent dealer for Abstract Expressionists.
He was included in the 1945 Whitney Biennial; in 1946, the Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his paintings. The Modern also included his work in its legendary touring exhibition "The New American Painting," which introduced Abstract Expressionism to European audiences in 1958 and '59. Between the late 1940's and 1970, Mr. Stamos exhibited regularly in New York, first with Ms. Parsons and then with Andre Emmerich.
Mr. Stamos's artistic style coalesced in the late 1940's and involved muted colors and soft-edged organic shapes somewhat influenced by the work of Milton Avery and William Baziotes. It was a style that he adhered to for the rest of his life, sometimes paring down the shapes to glowing fissures of color. Its strengths lay in its sense of muffled light and its sensitive, modulated surface. In the late 1980's, these surfaces turned thick and lunar and at times the lines of color would be backed by relaxed, squarish shapes reminiscent of Rothko's compositions.”