GERASIMOS FLORATOS

Life

Gerasimos Floratos was born in 1986. He grew up in New York and is a first generation Greek-American. He is a largely self-taught artist and regularly collaborates on works beyond the contemporary visual arts, such as comic books, graphic design and graffiti.

Gerasimos Floratos Artworks

Floratos works across painting and sculpture. His paintings often take a rough, gestural stylistic approach while drawing on elements from street art. Floratos’ paintings are textured and colourful, integrating various figures to populate his canvases. Along with these qualities, he has played with the structure of the canvas itself, by utilising lopsided and uneven frames.

In these works, Floratos creates his own ‘characters’ – ‘psycho-figurative’ roles that are combinations of people that he encounters on the street. In Peak (2020), he paints two abstracted figures in caps giving each other a high five, while in Imploding Minion (2017), he creates an amalgamated image of a figure raising both middle fingers at the viewer. Superimposed onto this image is a painting of a rabbit, seated and with lazy eyes in what feels like a provocation. Some common imagery in Floratos’ works include exaggerated human features, oversized shoes and pedestrians.

Greatly informed and influenced by his experience as a New Yorker, Floratos thinks through site-specificity and rootedness. His work draws inspiration from his studio’s position near Times Square, located underneath his parents’ deli. He more explicitly references New York as source material through his collages such as Treehouse (2020), where he integrates a photograph of Times Square into the artwork. In his practice, Floratos explores the structures of a highly globalised setting through a local lens.

Exhibitions

Gerasimos Floratos has held solo exhibitions at the Pilar Corrias, London; Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels; and Almine Rech, Brussels and Paris. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens; Hot Wheels Projects, Athens; Thaddeus Ropac, London; and HDM Gallery, Beijing.

Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2022