Born in 1976, Stelios Faitakis lives and works in Athens. Before starting to paint in a studio, Stelios Faitakis came to prominence at the heart of the rising Greek graffiti scene in the mid-1990s. After graduating from the Athens School of Fine Art, his worked was presented in the group show “Shit and Die” at the Palazzo Cavour, Turin (2014), at the first Kiev Biennale (2012), on the façade of the Danish Pavillion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), in the collective exhibition “Art in the Street” at the MoCa, Los Angeles (2011) or at the first biennale “Destroy Athens” (2007). He is represented by the Breeder gallery (Athens).
On gold or silver backgrounds, Stelios Faitakis’s history paintings decompose architecture, geometric symbols, or typography, while remixing references and techniques, from the paintings of Dürer to the murals of Diego Riviera, while embracing Cretan or Byzantine icons and the heritage of graffiti.
His desacralized icons present flaming haloes, Palestinian resistance fighters, riots, or the excesses of capitalism, dissolved into landscapes in which businessmen are hanged, along with the bling-bling debauches of gilded youth or, more recently, the deadly crossings of migrants.
