Scaling Walls

The first time I saw Alexandros Vasmoulakis’ work was in 2008, on the side of a building in Athens, Greece, near the Parthenon. Among a variety of graffiti tags and street art, a huge mural of a big-eyed, cartoonish woman caught my attention. I snapped a photo and carried on. A little over ten years later, a brightly gestural, collaged painting stood out to me from a gallery booth wall at the Armory Show in New York City. Among Athens-based The Breeder Gallery’s brilliant presentation at the fair, was a painter named Alexandros Vasmoulakis. I didn’t make the connection at first; nothing about this painting on the wall, Popcorn, from 2018, a combination of crayon, collage, and acrylic on canvas, suggested the mural he had made ten years earlier. But after some thought, it occurred to me: it had to be the same artist, right? At some point, Vasmoulakis had made a conscious decision to dramatically change the direction of his work, and I couldn’t wait to find out more about what he is doing now.