Nassos Daphnis was born in 1914 in the village of Krokeai, near Sparta. He emigrated to the USA when he was 16 and worked in his uncle’s flower shop while also becoming involved with painting. Eight years later he held his first one-man exhibition in New York. Invited to the house of a couple who had acquired one of his works, he realised the two directions he wanted to follow in life: dedication to rules and clarity, but also respect to development and evolution. His early works are characterised by naive representations, later moving on to a surreal bio-morphism influenced possibly by William Baziotes and Theodoros Stamos, with whom he shared a studio for a period.
While serving in World War II, he was involved in the construction of camouflage, an experience which defined the two-dimensional direction of his painting. After a visit to Greece in the 1950s, influenced by the intense reflections of light on the white houses and the landscape, where everything seems to lose their material hypostasis but not their form, he led his art towards geometric abstraction. Using basic colours such as red, yellow, blue, black and white, he created logically structured surfaces with lines or geometric shapes, distilling the experience of the Greek light. His meeting with the art collector Leo Castelli rocketed his later career.
Although he was among the avant-garde of the hard edge scene, Daphnis never stopped experimenting: over the next decades he created works using coloured Plexiglas, but also monumental works for building facades. He received awards from museums and foundations in New York and elsewhere. He died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the age of 96.
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