1980s AQUI! Magazine Pop Art Poster Print Issue #6 by Steve Gianakos 69"

Description

Aqui Issue No. 6 Illustrated Pop Art by Steve Gianakos.

Since the 1970s Steve Gianakos has been reveling in sexism, kiddy porn, cheap comics and coloring-book-style renditions of television characters, and is described as serving it all up with irony, tawdry punch lines and visual puns.

A recent exhibition in New York City, ""Whatever Tickles Your Fancy: Works from the 70s to the Present,"" was the first major showing of the artist's work there in many years. The show included numerous pieces, large and small, serving as both a mini-retrospective and showcase of current interests.

His images, generally derived from the lower echelons of popular culture, are mechanically enlarged, reduced, warped, repeated and recopied before being juxtaposed and joined together. Gianakos might use the same photocopied image several times to tease out different meanings in different contexts. To finish his works, Gianakos applies a layer of protective lacquer that makes the wrinkles and variegations in tone (and toner) permanent. The edges of most works are uneven and jagged, and Gianakos sometimes creates a pretense of the haphazard by integrating images of crumpled or overlapped papers from the margins of the copy machine's glass field.

Gianako's work has titles or subject matter like ""Ugly Girl with Big Tits;"" an octopus multi-armed-probing a girl's vagina in ""Her Parents Were Enthusiastic When she Told Them;"" ""Mrs. McDonald,"" a white-haired, older lady who raises her dress to have her mail inserted in her vagina by a smiling kangaroo postman; and ""Nothing Doing"" is a young girl's refusal to perform fellatio on a boy's enormously lengthy penis.

Before becoming an artist Gianakos was an industrial designer.

During the 80s, the colorful, illustrative oversized posters of AQUI Magazine were lining the streets of New York City, sold at bookstores such as MoMA bookstore and Printed Matter, and displayed at art institutions around the world. From 1983-86, Cliff Baldwin, Julie Bradrick and Davi Det Hompson collaborated with silk-screener Norman Lassiter and published ten issues of AQUI in downtown Manhattan. AQUI provided the public with accessible quality art at the price of $10 a poster, an affordable alternative to the traditional art gallery. The tabloid-sized, folded posters unfolded into one of two sizes: 45 x 69” and 35 x 45,” and featured silk-screened original artwork by Barbara Kruger, Les Levine, Steve Gianakos, General Idea, Gilbert & George, Davi Det Hompson, Julie Bradrick and Cliff Baldwin. To this day, the posters are significant because of their experimental typographic explorations and genuine promotion of democratic art making.

Condition

Good vintage condition, creases where folded, light distressing. This piece will be folded up for shipping, no frame included.

Dimensions

45" x 69"