Varda Chryssa moved from Greece, where she was born, to America, training at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, before settling in New York in 1955. The city's hectic, blaring visual culture and the rampant consumerism of post war prosperity fed into her work mainly sculpture, but some paintings and printmaking. Arrow Homage to Times Square 1958. Empire State Collection, Albany, New York is a huge sign made out of rows of small aluminum bars. Having apprenticed herself to a commercial sign maker, Chryssa began to make pieces in which a rainbow of lurid colors and a jumble of letters evoked the city's assault on the senses and its speeding pulse. In Five Variations on the Ampersand 1966, Museum of Modern Art, New York neon was enclosed in grey Plexiglas to give the effect of impending night. In the monumental Gates to Times Square 1964-6, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Chryssa vividly represented the chaotic visual culture of capitalism through a mixture of metal, plastic and neon. Paintings and prints playing with fonts, letters, numbers and layouts developed from the pages of newspapers and magazines. Chryssa has also represented New York's long history as home to immigrants in a series of works about Chinatown. An immigrant herself, she was included along with Lee Bontecou in the exhibition Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963. Chryssa's work can be expressive and poetic. Clytemnestra 1967, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, originally a part of Gates to Times Square, represents, in neon, the anguished scream of the character in Euripides's drama when she learns that her daughter is to be sacrificed.
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