John Kalamaras (1934 - 2020)

14. Green Shutter (Untitled), mixed media on masonite, 1972, signed and dated verso, 20 x 16 inches

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John Kalamaras was a California-based painter who during the 1960s and 1970s produced a striking body of Neo Immaculate works based on isolated images of doors, windows and shutters drenched in warm raking light. Born and raised in Vallejo, California, Kalamaras was a Renaissance man who excelled in languages, athletics, and academics, in addition to his fine art practice. 

Kalamaras attended Vallejo Junior College (VJC) in the early 1950s, where he first studied art seriously and was an award-winning member of the Contempos, VJC’s honorary art fraternity, while also playing football, baseball, and basketball. In the mid-1950s, Kalamaras attended the University of California Berkeley on an athletic scholarship, where he designed a new logo for the Golden Bears. In 1959, Kalamaras earned his master’s degree in educational psychology from Berkeley followed by several years of coaching at area high schools. In 1961, Kalamaras accepted a position as a counselor at the United States Air Force Dependent’s School in France at Dreux Air Force Base, a position that would change the course of his life. A fluent French speaker, Kalamaras studied art at the Sorbonne, where his engraving and etching skills were well regarded, and at the L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts with Dr. Jean Bersier. Through the mid-1960s, Kalamaras cultivated his interest in architectural subjects while painting in France and Italy. 

In 1965 Kalamaras returned to the United States to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree from Berkeley under the guidance of Professor Emeritus, Karl Kasten, where he began to paint in acrylic on large canvases. In 1966, he had a solo exhibition, Images in Line – Drawings by John Kalamaras, at the Pantechnicon Gallery in San Francisco. The following year, his work was published in Sculpture from Junk by Henry Rasmusen and Art Grant. In 1968 Kalamaras was selected to show at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, CA, in a three-artist exhibition together with Richard Diebenkorn and Helen Nestor, where Kalamaras’ work was praised for its Magic Realist “dream-like quality.” Kalamaras then won the Phelan Award for prints and drawings from the San Francisco Foundation in 1969. 

The Western Montana College of Art hosted a two-person exhibition of Kalamaras’ work entitled Supra Real in 1971, the same year he exhibited at New York’s Kretschmer Gallery. Kalamaras was honored with four solo exhibitions at the Pantechnicon Gallery in San Francisco, along with other one-man and group shows in Vancouver, Canada (Galerie Allen), California (Palo Alto Cultural Center, Esther-Robles Gallery, Los Angeles, and Jacqueline Anhalt Gallery, Los Angeles) and Tucson, Arizona (Montage Gallery). In 1976, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited Kalamaras’ work together with Karl Benjamin among others. LACMA also included Kalamaras in its 1978 and 1979 exhibitions Additional Space Expose and Additional Space Expose II, together with Frank Stella, Alexander Calder, and Inez Johnson and other prominent artists. Kalamaras remained a California native until his passing in 2020.