Untitled, 1983
Chinese Cityscape, 1983
Cycladic Books, 1957-1962
Chryssa (born Chryssa Mavromichali in 1933) comes from a famous and once-powerful family from the Deep Mani. She herself has said, "I do not come from a rich family [but from] a family with good education (for example, one of my sisters studied medicine) and good exposure to the creative arts": This sister, for instance, was a friend of Greek poet and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis.
Chryssa began painting while she was still an adolescent, and on the advice of a leading art critic in Greece, her family sent her to Paris to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in 1953-54. She was barely twenty-one when she sailed to New York. "I had an enormous curiosity about America and I felt that it would be much easier in America to achieve a freedom of expression rather than in European countries."
Sculptor Michael Lekakis met her at the boat, and after they had dinner with George Constant and his wife, Lekakis took her to see Times Square. He recalled, "When she saw Broadway all lit up, with electric signs going and coming, she was somehow transported into a visionary state that stayed with her, until, as it so happened, she resolved it in her work". Asked what influences she feels have contributed to her work, Chryssa responded, "Commercial advertisement, meaning my visual approach to Times Square". She added, "Times Square I relate to the Byzantine: neon advertising signs high up in the sky against a background of sky (as in Byzantine icons, the golden background) or the flat painted letters of the billboards".
After a brief period spent at the California School of Fine Arts, she returned to New York, where she executed her Cycladic Books. In these "books"-and later in a related series of tablets-she soon began molding on or stamping into the surface letters, punctuation marks, or other signs or symbols. Chryssa has called the interplay of light and shadow in these works "static light:" She continued to be preoccupied with semiotic elements of communication for many years.
In 1961, the Guggenheim Museum presented a solo exhibition of Chryssa's work, a remarkable honor for a twenty-eight-year-old. Meanwhile, she had begun using neon in her sculpture, sometimes incorporating rheostats so viewers could control the electric current; in these works, letters and words became something more than linguistic elements. From 1964 to 1966 she constructed a gigantic assemblage that she called The Gates to Times Square. Two huge letter As form the "gates" to a gleaming block of stainless steel and Plexiglas that seems to quiver in the play of pale blue neon light.
Chinese Cityscape (1983) consists of large intersecting lattices of honeycombed aluminum, in which the bold calligraphic shapes, backlit by neon tubes, suggest the Chinese characters on signs along the main street of New York's Chinatown.