Gary Stephan (born 1942) is an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

abstract

painter Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...

born in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

who has exhibited his work throughout the United States and Europe. He lives and works in New York City and Stone Ridge, NY 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 in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

Education

Stephan studied

industrial design Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical Product (business), products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advan ...

Parsons School of Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...

and at

Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York (state), New York. It has a satellite campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The school was ...

. In 1965, he moved to San Francisco and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

in 1967. After returning to New York, he was a studio assistant to Jasper Johns until he started showing with the

David Whitney David Whitney (1939 – June 12, 2005) was an American art curator, collector, gallerist and critic. He led a very private life and was not well known outside the art world, even though he participated naked in the 1965 Claes Oldenburg happenin ...

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.”

Work

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. Stephan surrounds his marks with shaped areas of negative space that destabilize figure/ground relationships. A color that is used as ground might come to the surface as a positive form. He also uses discontinuous areas of similar color that visually unite to create the impression of a singular shape. 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. 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. Stephan creates ambiguities of form that summon feelings that are not easily resolved. 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.

Exhibitions

His work has been exhibited at institutions including the

Drawing Center The Drawing Center is a Manhattan, New York, museum and a nonprofit exhibition space that focuses on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary. History The Drawing Center was founded by former assistant curator of drawings at ...

, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, the

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is located in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The Aldrich has no permanent collection and is the only museum in Connecticut that is dedicated solely to the exhibition of contemporary art. The museum presents the first ...

, 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.

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

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...

, Los Angeles, CA *

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...

, Los Angeles, CA *

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

, San Francisco, CA *

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...

, Washington, DC *

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

, New York, NY *

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

New York, NY * The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY *

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, New York, NY *

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

, New York, NY * Kunst Museum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland

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

References

External links

Artist’s website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stephan, Gary Modern painters Living people 1942 births 20th-century American painters 21st-century American painters Parsons School of Design alumni San Francisco Art Institute alumni