Despina Stokou (b. 1978, Athens, Greece; lives and works in Los Angeles, California) centers her work on expressive, text-based painting, and more recently, ceramics. Her compositions layer gestural marks with fragments of language drawn from digital communication, creating dense surfaces where words shift between legibility and abstraction. Rather than delivering fixed meaning, her paintings reflect the instability and overload of contemporary communication, where messages are constantly produced, distorted, and reinterpreted.
She holds a BA in Visual Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MA from the University of Fine Arts Berlin, Germany.
Stokou has been exhibiting at the Gallery since 2012. She has had solo exhibitions at The Finley, Los Angeles (2024); Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles (2018); Dio Horia Gallery, Mykonos, Greece (2018); Eigen + Art, Leipzig, Germany (2015); and Galerie Krobath, Vienna, Austria (2013). She has also been in group exhibitions at Hollis Taggart Gallery, New York (2024); Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton (2023); Dio Horia Gallery, Athens, Greece (2020); and 5 Car Gallery, Los Angeles (2018). Stokou’s works are in public collections at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston; Schwartz Collection, Harvard, Cambridge; Zabludowicz Collection, London, England; and Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin, Germany.