Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali (New York/Greece/France,1933 - 2013) limited edition print pencil signed l.r. "Chryssa", numbered l.l. "42/150", image size 25 1/2" X 35 1/2", sheet size 30 1/2" X 40", unframed. Proceeds from this lot to benefit the Print Club of Albany. The Chinatown Series was part of Chryssa’s ongoing minimalism, in particular regarding text as a medium of art. Chryssa has also represented New York's long history as home to immigrants in this series of works about Chinatown. Chryssa was always fascinated by language, perhaps because she had to learn not only a new language in the US, but also a new alphabet, since the Greek alphabet is Cyrillic. In a sense, these characters were abstracted and made in to individual artworks. She herself was also an immigrant, and the Chinatown series is also an homage to that. It has not been documented as to whether these characters in each of the 10 works in the Chinatown series had meaning beyond the extreme minimalist art form, as is seen throughout her work. Chryssa had long been fascinated with written communication and her early work, haunting and deliberately obscure, focused on writing — in particular on fragmentary bits of text — as a medium of art. Some of her first constructions were made of newspapers (in the New York of the period there were a great many to choose from), employing them as a sculptural medium. Others incorporated pieces of old advertising signs. Still others assumed the form of outsize letters and numbers, training the viewer’s eye on features of typographical anatomy, writ large. 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. Paintings and prints playing with fonts, letters, numbers and layouts developed from the pages of newspapers and magazines.

Scuffs and scratches.