Julian Stanczak Exhibition

Danese Corey

poster for Julian Stanczak Exhibition

This event has ended.

Danese is announce its inaugural exhibition of paintings by Julian Stanczak, who is now exclusively represented by the gallery. Paintings in the exhibition span five decades and include the recently completed Parade of Reds. This monumental work is composed of fifty panels, each sixteen inches square, depicting myriad geometric forms in a boundless range of brilliant reds. Throughout Stanczak’s career, circles, squares, parallelograms, grids, and an infinite variety of abstract linear configurations function independently as structural elements, and also serve as “containers” for an array of intense saturated color.
Stanczak’s first New York exhibition was held at the famed Martha Jackson Gallery in 1964. Entitled Julian Stanczak – Optical Paintings, the show sought to separate Stanczak’s work from the reigning styles of pop art and color field painting. In his review of the exhibition in Arts Magazine, Donald Judd first employed the term “Op” to describe Stanczak’s work, although only a limited number of his paintings fall within this category.
Regardless of designation, Stanczak’s work generates dynamic visual and even visceral responses. A constant sense of movement endows his paintings with the urgency of the “living, breathing moment” and emphasizes the synthesis of Stanczak’s observations of the physical world. Stanczak’s paintings are both measured illusions, as well as subtleties of ordinary, but vital experiences.1 In his interview with the critic Dave Hickey, Stanczak comments:
If I take time to really look at what I’m seeing, there is no limit to the secrets unveiled. I look to nature for clarification and crystallization, for things that I can use in my paintings…I live in the instant of recognition. In search of power through abstract clarity, I select shapes that have the maximum possibility for metamorphic action…we can only see what we understand! 2
Julian Stanczak was born in Poland in 1928 and emigrated to the United States in 1950. He received his B.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1954, and subsequently studied under Joseph Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli at Yale University, where he received an M.F.A. in 1956.
He has participated in major group and one-man shows, including the legendary exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Responsive Eye, 1965; Contemporary Painting, 1968 at the Whitney Museum of Art; Julian Stanczak: A Retrospective 1948-1998 at the Butler Institute of American Art, a traveling exhibition begun in 1998; and Optic Nerve at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio in 2007.
His work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many others.
Julian Stanczak lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio.
A full color catalogue with an artist interview by David Hickey accompanies the exhibition.

Media

Schedule

from March 21, 2008 to April 26, 2008

Artist(s)

Julian Stanczak

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