Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of Stephen Antonakos’s Project Drawings — the inventive series he made continuously from 1965 through 1973.  This is the first show dedicated exclusively to this body of work, and it is the artist’s fifth show with Bookstein Projects. 

Speaking of drawings, Antonakos said, “The hand and the mind are one.” The point, of course, is readiness.  If he was awake, he had a pencil in his hand. 

In the mid-1960s the artist was overflowing with ideas for neon work like the Orange Vertical Floor Neon (9’ x 6’ x 6 ‘), the Neon from Wall to Floor (10’ x 12’ x 14”), and the Red Neon from Wall to Wall (2’ x 2’ x 30’) — all exhibited in the Fischbach Gallery’s largest white space.

Since it was possible to realize only a few of his great rush of ideas in full-scale neon, Antonakos made exquisite intricate scale models – dozens of them.  Even this was too slow a practice to capture the many urgent images flooding his mind. Only drawing rapidly in graphite and colored pencil would enable him to capture the great sequence of individual compositions that document the formal evolution of his neon work from 1965 to 1973.

At first, we see vivid images for neon geometries on bases, with impatient notes and questions written to the side of the image. These soon developed into proposals defined by their walls, inside and outside corners, and other architectural configurations. These become increasingly declarative, especially as to the importance of placement — the definitive relationship between the work and the site.

Sometimes many drawings were made in a single day or through a sequence of days. Often these motifs become increasingly spare, sheet after sheet.  At other times, there was just a single manifestation of a formal idea.  The series continued with the same energy and invention for 8 ½ years.  As Antonakos said, “Only drawing can keep up with your mind." 

Assembled in curated grids and sequences, and installed in specific relations to the gallery’s architecture, these proposals speak articulately — both individually and within their visual contexts — of Antonakos’s concept of neon geometries as “real things in real spaces.”

The exhibition offers approximately 50 Project Drawings and one model for a red and yellow Neon Wall from c. 1967.