Chryssa

Chryssa ( Chryssa Vardea Mavromichaeli) (1933– ). Greek-born American sculptor, a leading exponent of Light art. She was born in Athens, studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris (1953–4), and the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco (1954–5), then settled in New York. There she experimented with various kinds of avant-garde work, and she was one of the first to explore the kind of banal subject-matter associated with Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, sometimes using words or letters as the entire content of a piece. In her early years in New York she was ‘utterly alone, broke and very happy', and she became fascinated with the bright lights of Times Square: ‘America is very stimulating, intoxicating for me. Believe me when I say that there is wisdom, indeed, in the flashing of the lights of Times Square. The vulgarity of America as seen in the lights of Times Square is poetic, extremely poetic. A foreigner can observe this, describe this. Americans feel it.’ In 1962 she began incorporating neon tubing in her work (she is said to have been the first American do to this) and she soon moved on to pieces that consisted entirely of neon tubing apart from the necessary wiring and casing. In 1964–6 she produced The Gates to Times Square (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), a huge, brilliantly coloured work, that is generally regarded as one of the most impressive light sculptures ever made; it is in the shape of a giant letter ‘A', symbolizing America. Her work is sometimes categorized as Minimal art, and it is also placed within the orbit of Pop art because it takes its inspiration from advertising signs. Sam Hunter describes Chryssa as ‘perhaps the only “light” artist in America who has managed to transcend both the limitations of Pop imagery and the technical seductions of her chosen medium', and he considers The Gates to Times Square ‘one of the truly impressive sculptures of the American post-war period’ (‘Chryssa’ in Art Studies for an Editor: 25 Essays in Memory of Milton S. Fox, 1975).