Biography
Cris Gianakos (born 1934, New York) is a Greek-American artist of the post-minimal generation whose career has unfolded primarily in New York while maintaining steady ties to Greece. Trained in design at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), he joined the SVA faculty in 1963 and has taught there ever since. Since the mid-1960s his practice has ranged across sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography.
Early on he aligned with New York’s avant-garde yet kept his distance from the industrial “rationalism” of classic minimalism. Instead, he bent geometry toward process, materiality, scale, performativity, and spatial experience. At the core of his work stands geometry—the Cross, the Diagonal, the Axis—not as cold abstraction but as a carrier of architectural thinking, of ancient sites and proportions. His 1970s Rampworks—large, graded inclines traversing and organizing space—recast construction as a choreography of bodies moving through an environment.
Gianakos moves fluidly between media and scale. From expansive wall and floor structures to the 1980s mylar drawings in acrylic, ink, and graphite—often with a metallic, palimpsest-like surface—he sustains a productive tension between gestural mark and geometric rigor. Since the early 1990s he has engaged the dialogue between ancient monument and contemporary form: photographic tracings of archaeological sites and sculptures (e.g., Winged Victory of Samothrace, kouroi) are “overwritten” with squares, rectangles, and diagonal axes, as if a geometric stylus were inscribed on the body of memory. The point is not to appropriate antiquity iconographically but to call up fundamentals—proportion, rhythm, geometry as cultural language. In parallel, his public works (U.S., Greece, Sweden) translate this inquiry into the open city, creating experiential arrangements of movement and pause.
His exhibition record is extensive. Since the 1970s he has appeared in major U.S. group shows (MoMA, P.S.1/Long Island City, Socrates Sculpture Park, Pratt Sculpture Park) and mounted solos at institutions such as the Nassau County Museum of Art (1979) and the University Gallery, UMass Amherst (1989). In Greece, a full retrospective at the State Museum of Contemporary Art / Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2002) mapped his contribution; more recently, presentations in Chania (Municipal Art Gallery, SITE, 2019) and at CITRONNE Gallery (Poros, 2008; JOURNEY, 2021) have highlighted both canonical installations and newer bodies of work. Collaborations in Stockholm and Rethymno complement chapters devoted to intaglio/prints and large drawing series. His work belongs to numerous public and private collections—MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg, Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and MOMus museums in Thessaloniki among them—attesting to his international reach.
As a member of the Greek diaspora, Gianakos lives and works mainly in New York while sustaining close ties to Greece (notably Chania). His long teaching at SVA runs in parallel with a studio practice that remains laboratory-like, material, and site-aware. In the post-minimal spirit—where process, place, scale, and time are equal constituents of form—he has built a corpus that continually reweaves geometry and lived experience. Greek cultural memory, not as nostalgia but as metric and logos, surfaces in the cross and the diagonal, in the rhythm of ramps, in the measured “length-width-height” that threads the work—so that, between New York and Greece, his practice reads at once as architectural proposition, visual research, and ongoing passage.
BibliographyCris Gianakos, exhibition catalogue, State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), ed. Miltiadis Papanikolaou, 2002.School of Visual Arts (SVA) — “Cris Gianakos: Faculty Listing” & “Cris Gianakos Collection.”Minus Space — “Cris Gianakos: Works on Mylar 1983–1989” & artist page.CITRONNE Gallery — press materials (JOURNEY, 2021; solo, 2008).Municipal Art Gallery of Chania / Ekathimerini — “Chris Giannakos: SITE,” 2019.GSA Gallery (Stockholm) — “Cris Gianakos – Biography,” 2016–2019 selections.This biography was created with the assistance of AI.