Making pictures work is rarely a challenge for Gary Stephan. Where he may labor is in the determination of how and where to “trim the fat.” Carefully calibrating the intersection of formal reduction and amplified cognition, what’s ultimately experienced is the discovery of a highly tuned pictorial instrument. Decisive geometries, muscular chromatic and value decisions and subtle surface densities mean that every part of each work has an important role in activating the whole. That aggregate has a function: to fully mobilize the dynamics of figure/ground and fact and fiction in painting. In his past work, one might find a baroque flourish or an elaborate apparatus used to fulfill his spatial systems; now the architecture is utterly lean, almost skeletal. The result is an enhanced charge of optical play that constantly forces a reevaluation of how and what one sees.
Gary Stephan is a New York-born painter whose work has kept viewers destabilized for more than half a century. He moves freely between painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, photography, and video and divides his time between New York City and Stone Ridge, New York. His recent exhibitions include “Cohere and go There” at Thomas Park Gallery in Seoul (2025) and “Tape on Paper” at Anders Wahlstedt Fine Arts (2024). In 2023 he showed recent paintings in Jersey City, and in 2022 he presented “This There” at both Furnace Art on Paper Archive in Connecticut and Grölle Pass Projects in Germany. Earlier solo shows include “The Machine in the Ghost” at Devening Projects in Chicago (2019), “The Future of Reading” at the Kienzle Art Foundation in Berlin (2017), and a 2016 exhibition at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. The Berlin presentation was also a retrospective that ran into January 2018. He has also shown at the Drawing Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Whitney Museum.
His honors include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, along with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Today he teaches in the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts and is represented by Devening Projects and the Kienzle Art Foundation. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, Flash Art, The Village Voice, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others.
Stephan studied at Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League (1961), then Pratt Institute (1964), and earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967. Back in New York, he worked as a studio assistant to Jasper Johns until he began showing with the David Whitney Gallery in 1970. That start, along with his appearances in the 1971 and 1973 Whitney Biennials, led Roberta Smith of The New York Times to describe his work as “among the most closely watched developments of the early ’70s.” Over the following decades he showed with Bykert Gallery, Mary Boone Gallery, Hirschl & Adler, and Marlborough Gallery in New York, and Margo Leavin Gallery and Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles.
