NASSOS DAPHNIS, CITY WALLS: From New York to Athens 1969-2023

Athens Municipality Arts Centre, Greece, 2023

The exhibition “NASSOS DAPHNIS, CITY WALLS: From New York to Athens 1969-2023”, hosted at the Athens Municipality Arts Centre, presented 9 major original works and one rare print of one of the works Daphnis created during his CITY WALLS period, coinciding with a revitalizing period for New York City and the public arts scene. Today Athens is changing and, among other things, art in public space is thriving in an unprecedented way. It is therefore only natural to be revisiting the work of the Greek-American artist who pioneered the conquest of public space through painting.

In 1950, after a visit to Greece, Daphnis gradually turned towards a geometric abstraction, with marked references to Piet Mondrian, developing a personal colour theory that relates to the way colours affect space. Henceforth, his works will be characterised by sharp lines with intense colour contrasts and distinct geometric shapes. As his work evolved, it combined the purity of form and colour of a minimalist with the expressiveness of an abstract expressionist.

After World War II, New York emerged as a leading city of the world, but by the late 1960s, job losses due to industrial restructuring led to rising crime rates and caused economic suffering and decay to befall the city. Established as a not-for-profit organization in 1967 by artists Richard Anuszkiewicz, Jason Crum, Nassos Daphnis, Knox Martin, Mel Pekarsky, Tania, Robert Wiegand, and other notable painters of the period, City Walls Inc. sponsored more than 50 murals by 28 different artists. In 1969, as a member of the City Walls Inc. group, Daphnis began a project of interventions in the public space, and by 1975 he had completed a series of large-scale works of monumental proportions on the facades of buildings in New York, under the title CITY WALLS.

Daphnis created his first City Walls mural in September 1969 on the side of a six-story building at Madison Square Park and 26th Street. Four primary-colored concentric circles were joined to create a warped rectangle in the center. Daphnis’ second City Walls mural was commissioned in July 1971 at 620 West 47th Street and West Side Highway. Daphnis presented a huge red, yellow, and blue star exploding against the sky, formed by the intersection of four equally sized rectangles, which was the start of his famous signature Star Series. In 1972, he created the third mural of the project: a work sixteen stories high, on the structural skeleton of an office tower being constructed on New York’s Times Square and 43rd Street. These works were still visible, albeit somewhat aged, until the mid-80s.