Miltos Manetas

Miltos Manetas (Greek: Μίλτος Μανέτας; born October 6, 1964 in Athens) is a Greek painter and multimedia artist. He currently lives and works in Bogotá.

Manetas has created internet art as well as paintings of cables, computers, video games and Internet websites since the late 90's. His work has been collected by Charles Saatchi. He is also the founder of "Neen", an Internet-based art movement launched at Gagosian Gallery, New York City in 2000.

Manetas presented the Whitneybiennial.com, an online exhibition that challenged the 2002 Whitney Biennial show.

Born in Athens, Greece to a prominent war family from Arcadia, Miltos Manetas moved to Milan at the age of 20, where he attended the Brera Academy. In 1995 he was included in Traffic, the survey exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud that helped to launch the Relational Aesthetics art movement.

Manetas was categorized as one of artists of that movement in the catalogue of the Traffic show, and later, in Bourriaud's book Relational Aesthetics. But at this time, Manetas decided to change his approach to art, abandoning performance, objects and site specific installations, and he began making paintings about computer technology, exploring the possibilities of creating art by using video games and the Internet.

In 1996, Manetas moved to New York City and began working on a series of video game-related artworks, using Lara Croft and Mario as "ready-made" characters. In SuperMario Sleeping, a video from 1998, Mario sleeps under a tree, while in Flames, a 1997 video, Lara Croft is constantly getting hurt. Both works were exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in the exhibition entitled Made in Italy. It was at that occasion that The Guardian published an article on Manetas calling him the El Greco of the geeks.

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