Resin Sculpture #115, 1971
Cristos Gianakos was born in 1934 in New York and grew up there, attending the School of Visual Arts, but states that he is "mostly self taught." His preference for large-scale work, mainly sculpture, may have been inspired by the architecture of St. Spyridon's Greek Orthodox Church in Manhattan's Washington Heights, which he believes helped determine his sense of "strong, geometric forms."
In 1967 he was represented in an exhibition, Posters from the Permanent Collection, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but he had already begun working with the diagonals that characterize his later work, inspired by a small wooden ramp-shaped object with slats in its sides that he found on the street and still keeps in his apartment. At that time, he was preoccupied with his "participation pieces" or "outdoor installations," such as a large Χ-shaped pattern of flour on one of the roads in Central Park (the geographical center of Manhattan) for bicycle riders to pass over and reshape. He also published a book of his photographs, The White Pit of Mykonos (1971): images of a lime pit from which the residents of that Greek island hauled up the lime to coat their dazzling white houses.
In the late 1970s, he began making small and large-scale ramps as a solution to the problem of organizing forms in space. These site-specific sculptures-their shapes suggested Franz Kline's calligraphic marks in three dimensions-contrasted or reinforced the existing character of the surrounding space.
A non-utilitarian, highly symbolic ramp lies in the crossing of a Byzantine church turned mosque, now apparently abandoned, in Thessaloniki. Titled Gridlock, Alaca Imaret Project (1997), it consists of a narrow broken beam laid across another beam lying flat on the floor, the slope of the topmost beam forming the "ramp:' The arms of the beams are of equal length, making a Greek cross, and the break occurs just above the center of the cross. The church/mosque is an empty shell, its walls stripped bare, with large gaps in the plaster, creating a wordless but extraordinarily articulate comment on the tragic pointlessness of religious conflict.