Gary Stephan

Gary Stephan (born 1942) is an American abstract painter born in Brooklyn who has exhibited his work throughout the United States and Europe.[1]

Gary Stephan
Born1942 (age 77–78)
Brooklyn, New York
NationalityAmerican
Known forPainting

He lives and works in New York City and Stone Ridge, NY[2] and is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA program. He is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery in New York City and Devening Projects + Editions[3] in Chicago.

Education

Stephan studied industrial design at Parsons School of Design and at Pratt Institute. In 1965, he moved to San Francisco and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967.[4]

After returning to New York, he was a studio assistant to Jasper Johns until he started showing with the David Whitney Gallery in 1970. This and the Whitney Biennial Exhibitions of 1971 and 1973 were followed by sufficient shows and reviews to prompt Roberta Smith in the New York Times to refer to his work as “among the most closely watched developments of the early ’70s.”[5]

Work
Gary Stephan, Untitled, 2019, tape on paper, 7 x 7 inches

Exhibiting since the late 1960s, Stephan creates Postmodern art in the form of idiosyncraticly abstract paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photography and video art.

Stephan builds paintings, abstract in form but pictorial in nature, with a few simple visual tools and colors, which he then uses to undermine a coherent view.[6] Stephan surrounds his marks with shaped areas of negative space that destabilize figure/ground relationships.[7] A color that is used as ground might come to the surface as a positive form.[8] He also uses discontinuous areas of similar color that visually unite to create the impression of a singular shape.[9]

Part of the power of Stephan’s paintings and drawings comes from their engagement with the architecture of their exhibition spaces in ways that mirror their formal structure.[10] Because of their color and facture, some of Stephan’s paintings may seem austere, but merely apprehending their complex formal structure does not settle their meanings.[6] Stephan creates ambiguities of form that summon feelings that are not easily resolved.[11]

As an abstract painter, Stephan evades the obvious seductive charms that painting offers. He is a rigorous formalist painter. Part of the strength of Stephan’s work is the way is engages our imagination through metaphor-eliciting ambiguities. All the feelings connected with these various interpretations coexist in the emotional resonance of his paintings.[12]

Exhibitions

His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Drawing Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Whitney Museum.

Stephan has had solo shows in New York at Susan Inglett Gallery, Bykert Gallery, Mary Boone Gallery, Hirschl and Adler, and Marlborough Gallery; in Los Angeles at Margo Leavin Gallery and Daniel Weinberg Gallery.

He had a retrospective exhibition at the Kienzle Art Foundation in Berlin from 13 September 2017 to 13 January 2018.[13]

Awards
  • American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
  • National Endowment for the Arts
  • The New York Arts Foundation

Permanent collections

Bibliography
  • Gary Stephan: Book of Nine, nine engravings after drawings with nine homographs. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1983
  • Peter Schjeldahl: Gary Stephan, Same Body Different Day. West Stockbridge MA, 1999
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References
  1. "Susan Inglett Gallery | Gary Stephan".
  2. "Gary Stephan | Biography".
  3. "Gary Stephan – Devening Projects".
  4. "Gary Stephan Biography – Gary Stephan on artnet".
  5. Smith, Roberta (2007-02-16). "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975 - Art - Review". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-05-09.
  6. "Gary Stephan". artnews.com. 2 June 2014. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
  7. "Gary Stephan: Interview". painters-table.com. 6 October 2012. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
  8. "Gary Stephan with Phong Bui". brooklynrail.com. 6 September 2012. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
  9. "Beer with a Painter: Suzanne Joelson and Gary Stephan". hyperallergic.com. 26 August 2017. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
  10. "Gary Stephan". bombmagazine.org. 1 October 1988. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
  11. "Catalogue essay: Raphael Rubinstein on Gary Stephan". twocoatsofpaint.com. 4 April 2016. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
  12. "Gary Stephan". artnews.com. 2 June 2014. Retrieved 28 April 2020.
  13. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2017-09-06. Retrieved 2017-09-05.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  14. "Garden Path | Smithsonian American Art Museum".
  15. "Gary Stephan | Study for Eating Light".
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