“A rare creative spark. This is what I saw in Chryse when I first saw her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1963. The same flame burned five years later at Harvard University, which was the beginning of our further collaboration and passionate about her work and the New World, free, uninhibited, immersed in her creative searches and experiments, devoted to her goal, she spoke about her work simply, with inspiration, without harshness and, of course, worked non-stop with music and good mood company”.

This is how the person and creator Chrissu (Vardea-Mavromichalis, 1933-2013) is remembered by the architect, researcher, honorary professor of the Delft University of Technology Alexandros Tsonis. They met young people across the Atlantic in 1968. She was at the forefront of the American and international avant-garde and had already established herself in New York. He, then a young professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, had just taken over the new interdisciplinary exhibition program of the university, presenting the works of great artists (drawings by S. Steinberg, photographs by M. Antonioni, etc.), among them the design of Chrysa.

In the Light Negative Positive exhibition he organized, he contrasted her work with large-scale reproductions of Rodin’s drawings. 85-year-old Alexandros Tsonis today tells us in detail about the busy days of exhibition activity in 1968 and 1969 – the year of the student uprising “Harvard strike” – and, of course, the evening of the opening of the exhibition (March 28). , 1968), for which, as he reveals, “Chrysa flew in in a private jet from New York, and if I’m not mistaken it was flown by her friend Philippa de Menil, daughter of the founder of the Menil Collection Museum in Houston.”

“A rare creative spark. That’s what I saw in Chris,” says her partner and friend Alexandros Tsonis.

Donation

More than half a century after the historic exhibition at Harvard, the works (37 drawings in gouache, charcoal and pastel, as well as an exhibition poster designed by her), donated by Alexandros Tsonis and his partner Lynn Lefevre, are presented at the Alex Mylonas Museum in the exhibition “Light-negative-positive – Greekness Chrissy, edited by Yannis Bolis and Maria Tsantsanoglu. “We decided to donate some of our archival material to MOMus, on the one hand, because the universal creative and ethical nature of Khriza’s work corresponded to the works of the Costakis collection, on the other hand, we appreciate the excellent research and exhibition work on the Russian language. avant-garde of Maria Tsanzanoglu. The third reason is my partial origin from Thessaloniki,” he tells us. The rest of the archive (Tsonis-Lefevre) of the Greek artist (letters, notes, manuscripts of lectures, photographs) will be placed in the National Library of France.

The donation section, framed by works from the collections of MOMus, EMST, Alpha Bank, as well as photographs of the creator (Eleni Mylonas archive), runs through Chryza’s visual universe. It highlights writing, communication, symbols, her cultural origins, the process of completing her work. “Chrysa was not the first to bring urban elements to art. The industrial materials, big letters from billboards, letters from “commercial” typefaces, and the neon she incorporated into her compositions showed an eclectic affinity for the pop art movement in the US, but Krisa was not a pop artist,” he notes. . Her work, abstract and minimalist, pursued a different goal: the creation of a “poetic” of “light and shadow” and the construction of public monuments that can be defined as the “cathedrals” of the New World.

Her symbolic works are considered “Times Square Gate” and “Clytemnestra” as they express “the heroic march of the people” and “the silent cry of pain and protest”, respectively. “For me, Clytemnestra carries the pain and anger of Picasso’s Guernica,” emphasizes Mr. Tsonis. “The sculptural composition, inspired by Irini Papa and her eponymous role in Kakogiannis’ Iphigenia, is one of the strongest symbols of the oppressed woman’s protest and the self-destructive warlike humanity.”