Stephen Antonakos
Stephen Antonakos made abstract paintings and found material assemblages in the 1950s, and started using neon light, which became his primary medium, in 1960. Antonakos’s career-long formal investigation of line, shape, and color is also manifested in his works on paper. These four works were created in 1980 during the artist’s six month stay in Berlin on a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service. There, Antonakos assembled collages from color-printed paper, each of which he considered to function like a page in a book. He saw his cuts through the paper and collage elements as a kind of visual text, an understanding that led him to create his first artist’s book, titled Cuts, in 1981.