Self portrait with purple wings

Despo Magoni was born in 1943 in Athens. During the period 1962-1967 she studied painting and hagiography at the A.S.K.T. in the workshops of G. Moralis and K. Georgakopoulos respectively. The following year she moved to New York, where she settled permanently, and pursued postgraduate studies in printmaking at the New School for Social Research. There she worked as a graphic designer until 1974 and then turned to painting. The urban environment of New York City with its energy, diversity and contradictions inspired her to develop an expressionist visual vocabulary in which she addressed the complexities of life by conflating the past with the present, the collective with the individual, the internal with the external world. After 2000 she turned to a more abstract writing through which she wanted to explore questions of science and the cosmic universe.