b.1933 -2013 | Greece

Chryssa (Vardea)

Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali (1933-2013) was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture, known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she always used the mononymChryssaprofessionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.

Full Biography

Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali (1933-2013) was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture, known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.

Chryssa's first major work was The Cycladic Books, a series of plaster reliefs which the French art critic Pierre Restany described as having produced "the purified and stylized geometric relief which is characteristic of Cycladic sculpture." According to the American art historian and critic Barbara Rose, The Cycladic Books preceded American minimalism by seventeen years. Chryssa's first solo exhibition was mounted at The Guggenheim.
She had exhibited her artworks in many famous museums and galleries in the world such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Minneapolis' Walker Art Center (1968), the Whitney (1972), the Museum of Modern Art in Montreal (1974) , the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (1979), the National Gallery in Athens, the Institutes of Contemporary Art in Boston and London and had participated in various exhibitions such as the São Paulo (1963,1969) and Venice Biennales. 1972). He had also met important personalities of that time in New York.

Her Artwork with the title "Mott Street" (1983), influenced by Manhattan's Chinatown, is located at the Evangelismos station of the Athens Metro. He had given her works to the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST).