NYAB Event - Stephen Westfall “Jesus and Bossa Nova”

Stephen Westfall “Jesus and Bossa Nova”

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

This event has ended.

Stephen Westfall’s paintings have always revolved around relationships among colors and between color and composition. Emerging from a post-pop, post-minimalist environment, and extending a history of hard-edge painting that springs from the roots of modernism, Westfall gained recognition as a skilled practitioner of grid-based geometric abstraction. His brand has been an outward facing abstraction, impure and imperfect, reveling in instability, humor and observational associations.

Those associations have included game boards, roadway signage, Navajo and Plains Indian motifs and Byzantine decorative patterns. The paintings of John McLaughlin, Frank Stella, Sol Lewitt, Agnes Martin, Nicholas Krushenick and Jo Baer all have a place in the ancestry of Westfall’s work, as of course does Mondrian. Less obvious perhaps is his affinity for Matisse:

Always in the back of my mind are Matisse and Mondrian, perhaps Matisse even more so which is why I don’t paint like him. But he’s somebody I think about a lot, in the way that I guess Ellsworth Kelly thinks about Matisse and doesn’t paint like him either. It’s there in the work if you can imagine Matisse doing hard edge painting - something that he wouldn’t have done - but the thing about historical distance is that you can do a mash-up like that.