Infinity Field, Delphi I

Title

Infinity Field, Delphi I

Creator

Theodoros Stamos
American, 1922–1997

Date

1971

Description

When he received his first one-man exhibition, in New York City at the Wakefield Gallery in 1943, Theodoros Stamos was just 20 years of age, but already his internalized biomorphic tendencies placed him well within the orbit of nascent Abstract Expressionists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollack, and Willem de Kooning. He was the youngest member of the group, all of 28 when he was included in the famous “Irascibles” photograph that appeared in a 1951 issue of Life magazine. Inspired by Eastern aesthetics, the organically inspired imagery that marked his earlier work gradually gave way to broader and far less representational fields of color. “Space, empty space,” he wrote in 1954, “became a positive factor; no longer something not filled and left over, but something asserting an attractive power to the eye.”

In 1970, Stamos began to spend a part of each year on the island of Lefkada, just off the coast of Greece in the Ionian Sea. The intense Mediterranean light, which tends to eliminate detail and wash both sea and sand into vast expanses of homogenous tones, played a major role in the creation of his Infinity Field series, begun in 1971 on both canvas and in print and featuring in nearly every iteration expansive segments of color delineated, as with the Delphi I manifestation on view here, by narrow variegations.

Contributor

Palmer Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania State University

Identifier

72.45

Rights

This image is posted publicly for non-profit educational uses, excluding printed publication. Other uses are not permitted.

Format

Screenprint; 24-3/4 x 23 in. (62.8 x 58.4 cm)