March 20 to April 26, 2014
522 West 24 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-647-9111

Gary Stephan’s new paintings exude matter-of-factness about their own making that perfectly embodies the often overused term “practice”.  Stephan toys with expectations of how foreground and background are supposed to function, slyly inserting illusionistic references that undermine the order and certainty of hard edge formalist abstraction.

Untitled (2013) offers a straightforwardly bold execution of a clearly conceived idea. In the center of the composition, the watery paint application of Stephan’s swirling strokes leaves a mercurial and ghostly impression upon the canvas.  After this opening salvo, Stephan counters by introducing a row of weighty, opaque, pale blue vertical bars. This oppositional contrast provides the tension that is Stephan’s wheelhouse.  He looks to exploit the ambiguities between negative and positive space. In this case he reanimates the ghostly ground, sprouting an illusionistic snake-like form that slithers through the vertical blue bars on the surface. This slide area of contingency is where Stephan teases out unexpected possibility.

Although operating within an extremely shallow pictorial space, Stephan transforms spatial relationships from a set of circumstances into a metaphysical event.  In the Small Mental Furniture paintings, we see how the purity of classical essentialism stands on the shoulders of an untidy world.  Using a minimal, non-objective abstraction as his ground, Stephan overlays this with a compelling architectural motif of interwoven bands whose resolute order begins to waver in the lower strata of the design. The foundational bracing anchors the larger structure to a proto-terrestrial foreground. But this base seems prone to destabilization: the whole enterprise may just sink into the sand or collapse like a house of cards. In the meantime, the iconic design, the shifting spatial relationships, the translucent paint handling, and the lush greens and deep blues satisfy.

Stephan considers how we visually perceive and conceptually locate our occupation of and relationship with architectural space. Stephan’s regard for cubist facture recalls Markus Lupertz’s Tent paintings of 1965 and the recent paintings of Thomas Scheibitz. Untitled (2014) looks vaguely like a window blind, or more specifically, like a window blind with a retinal after-image of a window or old format TV screen floating in front of it.  A square frame hovers in front of the larger, slatted structure behind. Gradations of a creamy hue border the central slatted shape, and indications suggest that shadow and light seem strictly observed and abstracted.  But are they?  Is this a window motif, or are we just projecting the expectation of a specific form into a realm of shadows?

Although we may not know what exactly is being depicted in this exhibition, in most of the paintings the viewer can unpack the steps involved in how each painting is constructed. We can follow the process almost as easily as we can follow the step-by-step execution of a portrait or a figure in a landscape by Alex Katz.  Though Stephan may paint an area and then paint over it, he does not obfuscate his moves or cover his tracks much. One small painting seems to retain paint impressions of kitchen cabinet hardware, removed and repainted. These still visible traces of underpainting are an essential part of what Stephan communicates – reconsideration and adjustment during the process.

At a moment in which market abstraction is being defined by such monikers as “raggedy AbEx” and  “zombie formalism,” Stephan is uninterested in a summary affirmation or a “look” that neatly ties-up his choices. He points out smaller questions that are as resonant as they are elusive. Where so many others are going through the motions he keeps moving on.

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June 27 to August 30, 2013
547 West 25th Street
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, a ruggedly alive exhibition organized by poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, presents fifteen artists who were in their prime during that decade. By focusing on the physical reality of the artworks, and the social reality of this specific group of artists, the exhibition escapes the trap of misty-eyed nostalgia or explicit revisionism. In his catalog essay, Rubinstein discusses the show as a way to disengage the story of abstract painting from the bottom-line narratives that are seen as the “official account” of the decade, in particular the advent of celebrity-styled painters, and the dominance of Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo, two labels that had more to do with marketing than with painted content. Instead, he offers the phrase “impure abstraction,” a hybrid mode of working between abstraction and figuration, to flesh out a portrait of a painting culture that was not as beholden to the one-critic model of analysis that effected the previous generation in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.

Reinventing Abstraction is more concerned with the transition of painting cultures and the accruing of historical knowledge than it is with the particulars of the decadent decade itself. The back-story to the 1980s begins with the social radicalism of the 1960s, when the majority of the exhibition’s included artists were in school, and continues through the 1970s when they were fully experimenting with their practice in an art world that had largely turned away from painting in favor of the dematerialization of the art object. The off-the-stretcher abstraction being made in the ‘60s and ‘70s had its own moment in the sun with High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975, an exhibition organized by Katie Siegel and David Reed, which Rubinstein acknowledges as a guiding spirit for his own show.

A feeling of disengagement from the immediate past manifests itself visually in many of the works on view. It is as if an invisible pane of glass were mounted on top of the canvas to emotionally cool off the fast and loose painted gesture. Jonathan Lasker’s Double Play (1987), a painting in elegant quotation marks, has all its ingredients diagrammed to perfection: a rich brown backdrop, radiating pink bars, and an area of gooey cross-hatched “painting” splashed up against the surface. David Reed’s No. 230 (For Beccafumi) (1985-6) is a vertical monument to the paint stroke, showing off a translucent-matte finish that is as sharp and slick as a silkscreen. In both works these artists are making visible the idea of painting as a compositional force sans the hot-headedness of late night studio labor. Similarly, Mary Heilmann’s exuberant Rio Nido (1987) is a play between foreground and background, between the painting as whole and the painting as parts. Blue, magenta, red, green, and yellow marks set against black are read as shot holes dripping paint, a remnant of an action, and the painting exists as the evidence.

Carroll Dunham’s Horizontal Bands (1982-83), is a Surrealism-inflected painting on pine board composed of alternating stripes of graphically rendered root vegetables, allowing one to see his trademark phalluses just over the horizon. The tentative nature of this early painting reads more as a private sketch than as a full-blown work, a proposition of fresh beginnings that charges many of the paintings on view. Bill Jensen’s The Tempest (1980-81), a dimensional portrait of a star-like figure, is thickly celestial, like a corner blow-up of a Van Gogh. Gary Stephan’s unromantically titled Untitled (#45418) (1988) is the most overtly mysterious work in the gallery, an image of a dusk-lit landscape divided in half by a biomorphic form that eclipses day into night.

What’s striking about several of the paintings in Reinventing Abstraction is their wall-dominating size. It’s a scale that brings to mind 18th-century history painting as easily as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), and speaks of financial resources and passion to burn. The lavish variety of surface textures and oil paint mixed with other media makes today’s abstract paintings seem especially anemic when it comes to materials and scale. Even the smallest work in the show, Thomas Nozkowski’s Untitled (630) (1988), radiates a deeply felt engagement with the largess of history and psychic space.

In comparison to the work on view in High Times Hard Times, the majority of artists in Reinventing Abstraction make their radical choices within the framed space of the traditional rectangle, putting an exquisite pressure on the pictorial possibilities of abstraction. A notable exception is Elizabeth Murray’s Sentimental Education (1982), a painting of conjoined parts whose scale and rapturous energy speak to the colossal task of painting as both action and object. For all its obvious labor of construction, the work epitomizes the fun aspects of high Modernism.  Her oil on canvas appears as malleable as a Play-Doh construction of cobalt colors and finely drawn zig-zags. In this painting, and indeed her entire body of work, Murray epitomizes the transcendent grace of the art student as grand master.

The paintings in Reinventing Abstractions are all un-mistakenly the work of grown-up artists coming to terms with inherited values while finding new rhythms with which to move abstraction forward. In this sense, the art could be seen as a visual complement to Paul Simon’s album Graceland (1986), a portrait of the decade in which commercial entertainment culture solidified its hold on American society, while also letting in the dreamy, fluent potential of Postmodernism as a way to break free from Modernism’s flight of progress. As a citizen of a tightly sealed, pluralist art world it can be easy to long for this not too distant past. It is important to fight this backward glance, and instead to ask, what does remain? I can think of a few things: the factuality of paint, the presence of art history and mentors, and the still shocking ability of a new abstract painting to dismantle the fiction of linear time, if only for a minute or two.

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Gary Stephan: ‘Painting And’ at Woodstock’s Kleinert/James Arts Center

August 7 thru September 12, 2010
34 Tinker Street, Woodstock, NY

Gary Stephan is one of the subtlest abstract painters, I always thought, but at some point in the 1990s, when the New York art world lost touch with him, so too did I. This show made me realize that I missed something. The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild exhibition space is a large auditorium, one big room with steep stairs up to a stage, and a large window at the center, on the left of the entrance.  On the far wall, between the paintings is a door beneath a red “exit” sign.  Chelsea’s exquisite upscale galleries look great even when emptied of art. This gawky space reminded me of the essay  “Some Questions in Esthetics” by the formalist critic Roger Fry, which describes how Corot, asked to paint “a huge, bleak, ugly, factory-like building,” did so by finding “an entirely unexpected and exquisite harmony of colour between the sunlit surface of the ugly building and the luminous sky behind. . . . . he created a moving spiritual reality out of an incredibly boring suburban scene.” That is exactly what Stephan has done.

On the wall to the left of the entrance are six paintings, going from large to small as they run up the stairs, set with their top edges almost in a straight line. On the far wall, one medium size picture is to the left of the door, and on the right two very small ones are set close together and on their right is a large painting. (There are also photographic and video works, on the right side of this display hall, which I choose not to discuss here.)  To understand Stephan’s bigger paintings you need to look across to his smaller, visually simpler pictures.  Painting of Paintings (light corners) (2009), the big painting at the left of the entrance contains hard-edge forms which are unpacked in Untitled (2007), the fourth painting on the right; and a lace-like acrylic texture which reappears in Summer (2004), one of the two small paintings to the right of the door.  In Untitled (2007), the light blue cross, set right of center with a light brown field on the right, and dark brown on the larger left is enclosed by a ‘C’ shape. Here, as in Painting of Paintings we are looking through an abstract window, not unlike the real window above the stage.

Originally Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross (1958-66) were installed in the new wing of the National Gallery, Washington in a gallery with fourteen walls. That installation allowed lucid reflection on their meaning as a sequence. More recently, in a singularly misfortunate curatorial miscalculation, they were rehung in a conventional rectangular shaped gallery. Most abstract paintings are not installation art. They only require good lighting and visually neutral walls.  But to understand Stephan’s recent individual paintings, you need to see how they relate to each other and the exhibition space. Only then does his play between surfaces, emphasized by the lace-like textures and his ambiguously abstract windows, become apparent.  Under the spell of Mondrian, the American Abstract Artists created a great deal of geometric painting that never went anywhere. And so it was natural for the art world to write off this tradition. But this exhibition shows that that was a mistake.  Not the least of Stephan’s achievements is to show that a moribund style of abstraction has enormous, as yet unexplored potential.

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January 20 – February 21, 2001

I’m always curious to see what Gary Stephan’s next show will offer.  I may or may not get hooked, but his consistent probe into the activity of abstract painting is usually persuasive.   His current show has no hooks but satisfies completely. It is direct and unfussy.

Though Stephan uses clearly defined edges, I’m reminded of Rothko’s early floating blobs and fields.   Instead of towing the integrity of the picture plane or peddling push/pull, Stephan stacks, contains and holds his forms, somehow tethering them with borders without relinquishing their buoyancy as they elusively slip and glide off.  These paintings embody subtle contradictions,  They are slow and generous, pressured and expansive, heraldic and peripheral, brash and incremental, static and in flux, abutting and passing. In light of abstraction’s recent tendency toward presentation, preciousness and premeditiation,  it’s refreshing to see Stephan’s direct, bare-bones, matter-of-fact hamfistedness.

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