Despina Stokou

Despina Stokou’s furiously energetic canvases layer text, collage, charcoal, and oil paint. These paintings react with immediacy to the breakneck speed of our daily information consumption while maintaining an inventive sensitivity to the history of expressive mark making. Her paintings incorporate sources as varied as html code, song lyrics, blog posts, classical music compositions, and most recently emojis. While her new emoji paintings are a slight departure from her earlier text based paintings, they continue a trajectory of exploring contemporary vernacular. Reacting to the information in her periphery through densely layered gestures, Stokou creates a new conversation about collapses of language as they relate to the history of abstraction today.


Her work has been included in exhibitions at Gagosian, Athens, EIGEN + Art, Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Ibid Projects, Los Angeles, Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna, Galerie Krobath, Vienna, The Breeder, Athens, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, Center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, and several others. My work was also included in ReMap4, Athens. 


Courtesy of Derek Eller Gallery

SHOWS