Artist

Despina Stokou

Born in Athen, 1978 and lives in Los Angeles, USA

Despina Stokou currently resides in Los Angeles and works primarily in the medium of painting. Her practice uses a range of mixed media, including collage, oils, chalk, and spray paint, to explore the potential of text to a viewer. Engaging with the modern day excess of written communication, she draws from online and printed sources, lifting words from their original context to form new, half and hidden meanings on the canvas. Words once existing as narrative become fragments of colour or texture within the wider composition, allowing linguistic and aesthetic communication to intersect.
Her canvases are riotous clouds of words whose textual nature, when compounded, transforms into abstraction. Stokou’s frenzied graffiti-scrawl recalls the gestural work of Cy Twombly or the street art aesthetic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, hovering on the edge of comprehension while echoing the chattering, noisy, digital age that we live in.

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