#gary stephan

[jokeanddaggerdept]

[foolingthesilence]

Gary Stephan, 2011

[wally-b-feed]

Gary Stephan (B 1942)

[regel-maat]

[foolingthesilence]

Gary Stephan

[thriftstorescans]

Gary Stephan - Sator, Arepa, Tenet, Opera, Rotas (1982) 

[blakegopnik]

THE DAILY PIC:  I can't deny being bored stiff by most current abstraction (including the stuff in this year's Whitney Biennial). It seems at best to be tweaking a tweak on a tweak on a vintage movement. But then today's Daily Pic isn't really abstract, is it? It's called "Small Mental Furniture (Red and Blue)", painted in 2013 by Gary Stephan and now on view in his show at Susan Inglett gallery in New York. In its brushy gray bits, there's a strong reference to mid-century design – as though Stephan had painted some kind of cross between a vintage TV and the webbed seat from a piece of Danish Modern furniture. And, in that context, Stephan's hard-edged color-field passages look like they're from the kind of painting that could have hung on the wall behind such goods.  I also have to admit – mea culpa – to getting straightforward perceptual pleasure from the way  the combination plays  optical games: the pink-striped square in the painting's center bounces forward, on top of the "furniture's" webbing – or as an image on the "TV" – and then recedes to become part of that color-field  painting hanging on the wall at the rear.  (Image courtesy Susan Inglett Gallery, NY)

The Daily Pic also appears at blogs.artinfo.com/the-daily-pic. For a full inventory of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.