ALEXIA STAMATIOU

Born in Miami, FL. Works in Brooklyn, NY. Represented by the LaMontagne Gallery, Boston.

www.alexiastamatiou.com

“THIS SERIES IS ABOUT LOVE and sex and birth and joy but still with a tiny presence of skulls/death, in keeping with the fact that as soon as we are born we begin dying, and also with reference to the french term ‘La Petite Mort’, where an orgasm is thought of as a small death. (You can’t really escape it, even at the very beginning!)”

“I WAS READING JOSEPH CAMPBELL and it was like a lightning bolt shot through the window when he described The Cosmogonic Cycle and The Universal Round. Rather than basing the new paintings on existing groups, I would start a new cycle. That led me to make sparkling, adorned phalluses shooting mimes into an inky void, along with the couple portraits. The mimes were intended to be icons of a shared, universal language (common gestures).”

“WHAT MOST MADE ME want to go into the studio could be boiled down to the three most basic, universal things that we all experience: birth, sex, death (and then the things that come with them like language, communication, love, fear, war, mourning, taboos, etc). While my focus lingered on the death part for years, it suddenly occurred to me that I really wanted to start making work about the beginning rather than the end. It was kind of a revelation.”

“MYTHOLOGY AND CREATION MYTHOLOGY have been big creative triggers for me for as long as I can remember. I used to love pulling from folklore and accounts of cult rituals, sort of weaving them into an imagined narrative.”

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