Despina Stokou

Despina Stokou is a contemporary artist and writer from Greece, known for transposing swaths of text-based information from the internet onto canvas. She primarily produces gestural, expressive paintings, often large and displaying vivid color, that include layered collaged text elements out of paper or plasticine. Ceramic is a new medium for Stokou and one where the actual California land and plantscape enter her usual text-focused vision. The clay cutouts coincide with or mimic the negative space around letters and words, an emptiness that offsets language—a space opposed to talk yet defined by it.