Stephen Westfall, Large Stephen Westfall Diptych Abstract Oil Painting Post Minimalist Pop Art, 1988

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STEPHEN WESTFALL (American, b. 1953) ''Days and Nights Without End'' (diptych) 1988, oil on canvas signed, titled and dated on … Read more STEPHEN WESTFALL (American, b. 1953) ''Days and Nights Without End'' (diptych) 1988, oil on canvas signed, titled and dated on canvas verso 60'' inches square; 85''h, 170''w combined. Stephen Westfall (born 1953 Schenectady, New York) is an American painter, critic, and professor at Rutgers University and Bard College. When Stephen Westfall was an adolescent, he was fascinated by the social spaces created by architecture. By age twelve, he was bringing home architecture books about Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, and Luis Barragán, architects who carved up space with colored walls. Barragan was more polychromatic, but even white was a color for Corbusier, who also added color to his interior walls in his chapel architectural masterpiece. Stephen Westfall attended University of California, Santa Barbara with a B.A. and M.F.A. in 1978. After an art class taken at the College of Creative Studies in Santa Barbara which further ignited his already creative spirit, he picked up an art major to go with a Literature major. As a student, he loved 60’s American abstract painting because it seemed to address interior space with the same forthrightness that the architects he admired addressed exterior space. He later received his Master of Fine Arts also from the University of California, Santa Barbara. While he was still an undergraduate, he also began writing art criticism for Art Week, then the only art magazine on the west coast. He has continued to write art criticism after he moved to New York (state), beginning with Arts Magazine in 1981. A self-described “poppish, post-minimalist geometric painter,” Stephen Westfall creates images that explore color, form, and flatness—and the relationship between these elements—as well as the legacy of Minimalism and the Hard-Edged school. Finding inspiration everywhere from Roman floor tiles to Navajo motifs and game boards to billboards, Westfall makes compositions that engage in dialogue with the art of John McLaughlin, Frank Stella, Sol Lewitt, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, and even Henri Matisse. While his geometric arrangements appear perfectly rendered to the viewer’s eye, the artist insists he doesn’t use tape, instead allowing a hint of the hand to remain.Stephen Westfall’s paintings have charted a course between post-minimalist geometries and a Pop art inflected awareness of a painting as a thing in the world. The brightly colored diamonds, triangles and trapezoids in his most recent canvases are conjoined into dynamic compositional skeins that seem to lean into space rather than recede. Drawing on Caucasian and Navajo Rug, medieval heraldry, Byzantine floor tile, early twentieth-century abstraction, architecture and Pop, Minimalist and Postminimalism, Westfall’s abstraction is deeply acculturated while formally honed into an active, perceptual immediacy. Over the course of the last decade, Westfall has focused his work to address architecture more directly and wall paintings have become his way to fuse paintings to architectural scale. He regards these paintings as now being essential to his artistic practice as his paintings on canvas and paper, which are bound by more conventional notions of portability and transferability. Important exhibitions of these wall paintings have taken place at Art Omi in 2014, The McNay Art Museum in 2015, and at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also in 2015. In 2018, Westfall worked closely with Queens-based glass fabricator Depp Glass to create the 47 laminated glass panels installed at the 30 Ave Subway Station in New York City. The scale, mirrored glass, and merging movement invoke not only the repertoire of processional themes in classical friezes, but also the movement of public transportation in our contemporary life, in particular the shuttering of light through the mezzanine windows and the bustle of commuters in our mass transit system. After Westfall received his MFA in 1978 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, he had his first solo exhibition in 1984 at Tracey Garet in New York’s East Village and earned reviews that took note of his particular brand of geometric abstraction. Exhibitions followed during the 1980s and into the 1990s at Daniel Newburg Gallery in New York, Galerie Paal in Munich, Germany and Galerie Wilma Lock in St. Gallen, Switzerland. An exhibition of paintings took place at Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York in 1995, followed by several exhibitions at Galerie Zurcher in Paris. Recent work has been exhibited at Kunstgalerie Bonn in Germany, David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe, Galerie Gisela Clement in Germany, Robischon Gallery in Denver, LA Projects in Germany, and Anne Morreseri-Marlio Galerie, Switzerland. Westfall has been included in several important survey exhibitions of abstract painting including Abstraction/abstractions, géométries provisoires at the Musée d’art Moderne in Saint-Etienne, France in 1997 and in both exhibitions titled Conceptual Abstraction, first at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991 and in the exhibition that revisited that show which took place at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 2012 (along with Ross Bleckner, David Diao, Lydia Dona, Christian Eckart, Stephen Ellis, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, Valerie Jaudon, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Bill Komoski, Jonathan Lasker, Sherrie Levine, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Stephen Westfall and John Zinsser). He was included in the show American Abstract Artists 75th Anniversary by OK Harris gallery along with Richard Anuszkiewicz, John Goodyear, Charles Hinman and others. His writing has appeared in Art in America, Vogue magazine, Flash Art, New York Magazine), Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Arts Magazine, ARTnews, Partisan Review, and The New Criterion. Awards Westfall has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Nancy Graves Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He received a Rome Prize Fellowship and spent a year at the American Academy in Rome during 2009 and 2010. He has been a professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University since 2005, and a tenured professor since 2010. He was also painting chair at Bard University's Milton Avery School of the Arts for a number of years and now serves as a lecturer. He is a Contributing Editor at Art in America. 2019 NYS AIA Excelsior Award (MTA Astoria Station Project) Americans for the Arts 2019 Public Art Network (PAN) Year in Review (Astoria Station Project) 2009 Rome Prize. 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship 2006 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists 2005 Princeton University Fellow, Humanities Council 2002 Academy Award in Painting, American Academy of Arts and Letters 1993 National Endowment for the Arts SELECT PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD Bon Marche, Paris, France Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO The Library of Congress, Washington, DC Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Museum of Modern Art, NY The New York Public Library, NY Rubin Museum, New York, NY University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara, CA Whitney Museum, New York, NY Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ See less