Danae Stratou

Danae Stratou (Greek: Δανάη Στράτου) is a Greek visual and installation artist and former adjunct professor of fine art. She was born in Athens in 1964.

About

Stratou studied fine arts at the London Institute Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martins) between 1983 and 1988, and she was an adjunct professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 2007 to 2012. Stratou represented Greece at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 (the first woman in 30 years to do so), and the Adelaide Festival in Australia in 2012.[1]

She is the co-founder of the non-profit organisation Vital Space. Vital Space is based upon the principle that artworks can change the world for the better[2] and "is dedicated to the initiation of art projects designed to reach and influence a wide and diverse audience."[3]

Notable works

Her work has been on display in the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens[4] and are also on display in museums and private collections in Israel, France, the United States and Egypt.

In 1995 she collaborated with industrial designer Alexandra Stratou and architect Stella Constantinides (together known as D.A.ST. Arteam), and in 1997 they created Desert Breath, a 100,000 square metre spiral-shaped sand sculpture in the Eastern Egyptian Sahara desert near El Gouna by the Red Sea.[5][6]

For the 2004 Olympics in Athens, her piece The River of Life at the National Museum of Contemporary Art was a part of the Transcultures project. It showed seven videos on seven large screens in a circular room; the films were shot over ten months of seven major rivers from sunrise to sunset with the camera fixed in the same position to capture the uninterrupted flow and shared rhythm.[7][8]

In her 2007 project Cut – 7 dividing lines she covered 60,000 kilometres with her then partner (now husband) Yanis Varoufakis to photograph seven security walls that divide populations. The works were shown at her gallery Zoumboulakis in Athens.[9]

Personal life

She is married to Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister and renowned economist. Her mother is Eleni Potaga-Stratou, a Greek modern artist, and her father is Phaidron Stratos from the family Stratos who founded the Peiraiki-Patraiki textile industry in Patras, Peloponnese, Greece’s largest textile industry in the past.[10] It has been speculated that she was the subject of Pulp's hit "Common People".[11]

Notes
  1. "The Forum - Taming Nature - 28 Mar 16". BBC World Service. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  2. "The Forum - Taming Nature - 28 Mar 16". BBC World Service. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  3. "Vital Space". Vital Space. 2013-08-10. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  4. "Management Assessment 2004". Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art. Archived from the original on 9 April 2016. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  5. Jobson, Christopher (2014-02-20). "Desert Breath: A Monumental Land Art Installation in the Sahara Desert". Colossal. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  6. Carrington, Daisy. "Is this an alien landing site, ancient monument, or something else?". CNN. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  7. Morgaine, Alice. "Danae Stratou Exhibition of Fondation d'entreprise Hermès from 10 September to 16 October 2010" (PDF). Danae Stratou. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  8. "The River of Life by Danae Stratou, 2004". Vimeo.
  9. Morgaine, Alice. "Danae Stratou Exhibition of Fondation d'entreprise Hermès from 10 September to 16 October 2010" (PDF). Danae Stratou. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  10. Chrisopoulos, Philip. "The Artist Wife of Controversial New Greek Finance Minister". Greek Reporter. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  11. "Greek finance minister responds to claim that wife was inspiration behind Pulp hit". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
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