Chryssa (Vardea)

Chryssa Vardea was born in Athens on 31 December 1933 and grew up during the Occupation and the Civil War. She was drawn to painting in the Athens of the early 1950s, then left Greece in 1953 for Paris, where she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and met artists of the European avant-garde. In 1954 she sailed to the United States, studied for a time at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and in 1955 settled in New York, which was to be her city for almost forty years. She signed her work with her first name alone, Chryssa.

New York in the late 1950s was the capital of Abstract Expressionism, but Chryssa looked elsewhere: at newspapers, at the letters of advertising, at the electric signs of Times Square. By the early 1960s her work was in major exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art's show Americans 1963, and museums began to buy it. She worked slowly and obsessively on large projects, with long periods of withdrawal. In 1992 she closed her studio in SoHo and returned to Athens, where she continued to work in a studio of her own in Neos Kosmos, increasingly isolated and in poor health. She died in Athens on 23 December 2013, a few days before her eightieth birthday.

Chryssa's subject was the sign: the letter, the logo, the fragment of text cut off from its meaning. Her early Cycladic Books (1957–1962) are white plaster reliefs pressed from the shapes of folded paper and book covers, as calm and spare as the Cycladic figurines of the Aegean that gave them their name. She then moved to paintings and reliefs made of repeated letters and newspaper pages, and in works such as Times Square Sky (1962) she began to use the actual metal letters of commercial signs.

Her great step was neon. The Gates to Times Square (1964–66), now at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, is a monumental walk-through cube, about three metres on each side, of stainless steel, Plexiglas and pulsing neon, entered through openings shaped like a huge letter A: an arch you enter, as into a temple, made of the materials of Broadway advertising. It is at once a celebration of the American city and a meditation on writing and light. In 1967–68 she pursued the theme in neon works such as Clytemnestra, named after the tragic queen and inspired by her friend Irene Papas in the role, where the light seems to stutter and break off like a cry. Critics have seen in her work a bridge between Greek tradition, the alphabet, the temple, the tragic heroine, and the most modern American materials, and have placed her among the inventors of light art, beside and often ahead of better-known male contemporaries.

For decades Chryssa was better known abroad than in Greece, and better known to artists than to the public. Interest has grown sharply since her death. Major American museums hold her work, and in 2023–24 a large exhibition, Chryssa & New York, shown at Dia Chelsea in New York and at the Menil Collection in Houston, presented her again as a pioneer of neon and Pop. In Athens the National Museum of Contemporary Art (ΕΜΣΤ) owns her Cycladic Books, and a version of Clytemnestra stands outside the Megaron, the Athens Concert Hall. A good thing to do: look up images of The Gates to Times Square and of the Cycladic Books side by side, and ask yourself what an ancient Cycladic figurine and a Broadway neon sign have in common; that question is the heart of her art.

• She signed her works with her first name only, Chryssa, and is known everywhere simply by it.
• The Gates to Times Square is a cube you walk into through openings shaped like a giant letter A.
• Her white plaster Cycladic Books were named after the ancient marble figurines of the Cyclades.
• She was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Americans 1963, one of the defining shows of the new American art of the time.