NYAB Event - Gary Stephan and Alina Tenser Exhibition

Gary Stephan and Alina Tenser Exhibition

Susan Inglett Gallery

This event has ended.

Susan Inglett Gallery presents new work by Gary Stephan and Alina Tenser.

On first approach Gary Stephan’s (b. 1942) paintings present as a strictly formal affair. A quick read reveals modernist compositions constructed from a circumscribed collection of shapes, palette, and strokes. That the components are familiar and the pieces appear to fall into place is part of the seduction. Stephan is not interested in the neutral reception of his work, but engaging the viewer as co-conspirator or co-constructor in a new reality. Looking to the fundamental conundrum of painting presented by the transference of objects to a flat surface, Stephan’s work toggles endlessly back and forth between statement of fact and fiction. The vacillation is the thing. Images surface only to re-submerge below a welter of webbing and glyphs, neither stroke nor illusion prevails.

Alina Tenser’s (b. 1981) sculpture and video share a vocabulary with Gary Stephan, where all good conversation begins. The glyphs and lozenges that allude to real objects and real space in Stephan’s work quite literally glide across the surface of Tenser’s. They skitter, skate, collide, and ultimately come to a rest, balancing somewhere between furniture slides and pure geometry. Teetering between image and object, the thing and the thing itself. Writing on Stephan’s work, David Levi Strauss observes that the work is a “conversation—with the visible world, first, the world of appearances, and then with other engaged observers. Each (piece) is an invitation, carefully and generously proffered.” Tenser and Stephan’s is a dynamic repartee, a conversation in which we are both witness and active participant.

The Gallery will publish a catalogue with an original essay by Raphael Rubinstein and a conversation between Gary Stephan and Alina Tenser on the occassion of the exhibition.

GARY STEPHAN was born in Brooklyn, NY. He attended Pratt Institute, NYC and received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Stephan has been showing his paintings, drawings and sculpture since the late sixties in the United States and Europe. He has had solo shows at Bykert Gallery, NYC; Mary Boone, NYC; Hirschl and Adler, NYC; Margo Leavin, Los Angeles, CA; Marlborough, NYC; Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC; and Daniel Weinberg, Los Angeles, CA among others. His work is included in the collections of The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art as well as museums nationwide. He is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and most recently a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. Stephan teaches in the MFA program at School of Visual Arts in NYC.

ALINA TENSER was born in Kiev, Ukraine. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NYC and her MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University. Tenser has had solo exhibitions at A.I.R Gallery, Brooklyn; Essex Flowers, NYC; Nurture Art, Brooklyn; and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Global Committee, Brooklyn; Parisian Laundry, Montreal, Canada; Kate Werble Gallery, NYC; Soloway Gallery, NYC; Gallery Diet, Miami, FL; The Kitchen, NYC; Jancar Jones, Los Angeles, CA; and Laurel Gitlen Gallery, NYC. Tenser received the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship and was a resident of Recess Sessions in 2012.