Name:
Duke
Surname:
Stergos
BIRTH : ATHENS GREECE
The art of collage helps me to express my perceptions of the modern world. It is a way of making certain statements on issues that deeply concern me and I could say concern, most of us.
Using simple materials such as magazine and newspaper clippings I provide a picture on a plain background that represents certain emotions via a main theme. The background is plain, in order to direct the observer to focus on the main image.
My aim is not only to create pictures of collage born out of many clippings and deliver a quality piece of art, but also to tackle issues that I value important, for global well-being. The final outcome is easily understood, as most people are familiar to magazine and newspaper materials.
Why to choose the art of collage to deliver art? The answer could be that modern world provides us, with alternative routes toward expression.
My tools are a pair of scissors, a glue and my colour blindness.

Duke Stergos work reflects interests and concerns of a modern man that listens worries and anxieties in a global setting. Poverty, nutrition, genetics, modern diseases, racism, migration, terrorism and wars are some of those that compose his usual issues. Using magazine and newspaper clippings, he synthesizes an artistic effect similar to representative painting. Different photographs and separate pictures are submerged in the final, total image creating a new world, a completely developed an autonomous system. Although, collage and montage are known techniques in Art History, in Duke Stergos hands and imagination they form a new meaning and receive a new expressive strength. The expressive possibilities of collage seem so simple that one is tempted to think that anyone could employ them to equal effect. Yet it becomes obvious that Duke Stergos accomplishment consists of having developed his own syntax to control and set limits on the infinite number of possibilities offered by existing materials and forms. The modern viewers familiar to pictures from their everyday life feel comfortable with Duke Stergos images and they can easily identify themselves in Duke Stergos artistic world. Duke Stergos invites his viewers to travel with him in new unexplored emotional and intellectual territories.

Sophia Bakogianni
Art Historian
Sophia Bakogianni, MScPhd Candidate,
Department of Cultural Technology &
Communication,
University of the Aegean, Greece.