Nike Georglou

2/13/2018

Caroline Ivy

Nike Georglou is a paper artiest who specializes in sculpture art. He produces them out of recycled ephemera and books from his local area. Georglou stacks the paper in brick form to create his sculptures. He manipulates the paper materials into different shapes such as wiggly lines, swirls and zigzag to add dimension and creativity to his work. He will also paint onto the books to create color and odd shapes that complement the direction and pattern of his paper brick paper placement. The pictures he produces of people and places out of pieces of square and rectangular 3-D shapes is amazing. I’m going to talk about three of his piece that stood out to me: A Night Swirling, Calypso and Turn into Light.

A Night Swirling, 2017
This picture really stood out to me because of Georglou’s spiral formation of the books in the eyes. I also appreciate how adds color to the books in order to add more dimension and uniqueness. The vertical positioning of the books pare nicely with the dark cityscape in the back. He uses orange in the sky to illustrate a sunset fading into the night. The purple building 3/4th to the right is representative of a city sunset. The consistency of the book direction is pleasing to the eye. His work is clean and chaotic.

Calypso, 2016
Calypso is of a lady lying down on what appears to be a blanket or a float on top of water. I am most drawn to the way Georglou creates the ladies eyes with folded pieces of paper. The fingernails are also formed with this folding technique. Placing books horizontally and vertically across the backboard and then painting horizontal and vertical stripes on the books is a unique pattern and style to Georglou.

Turn into Light, 2008

Research done by Caroline Ivy
All sources found on the artist website.

Ruby Inurriaga

2/15/2018 06:56:07 pm

Hi Caroline, great research project! I had never heard of Nike Georglou before, their work is awesome - super interesting interesting technique and very vibrant. I will definitely be looking into them more!

tessa rippenhagen

2/15/2018 07:18:11 pm

Wonderful and inspiring! I enjoyed learning about his work and process of building 'brick' like structures, and using book parts as patterns. I can definitely learn alot from Nike's work about volume and construction methods for paper sculpture. thank you for sharing!

Eva Chen

2/15/2018 08:17:01 pm

Hi Caroline, I personal think that paper is very difficult to many 3D art; however, paper sounds very simple object. I like the first project, the colors are really balanced and city view of the back is matched the two persons which is perfect work. I'm so glad that you introduce this artist on the research project, so I can know the works.

Lisa Zirbel

2/15/2018 09:38:27 pm

I think the work is beautiful and compelling but I'd like to introduce a different line of thought: As a bibliophile and someone who has studied the history of book making and book construction, I always find it a personal struggle when artists manipulate books. What are the ethics of destroying the readability of a book? Is there a hierarchy of written material- fifty cent romance novel or the Bible? What makes a book seem more precious than a periodical? Does anybody else feel this same pull?

Andrew Caruso

2/19/2018 09:14:26 pm

To respond to Lisa’s question, I feel the same pull. I have been thinking about this often lately, after recently deconstructing a book for a project. To add to that, I just came back from a conference yesterday where the host deconstructed and repurposed books by printing on them. He then used them in an installation consisting of a large amalgamation of pages from several books. The work he made was beautiful, however, I feel a sense of confliction. This same conflicting notion was on my mind throughout the essay on Tuttle’s work.

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Nike Georglou

Turn into Light, 2008

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