NYAB Event - Stephen Maine “Halftone Paintings”

Stephen Maine “Halftone Paintings”

490 Atlantic

This event has ended.

490 Atlantic presents an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Stephen Maine. The exhibition includes paintings from Maine’s Halftone Paintings series, as well as several handmade books.

Maine uses a deliberately crude imprinting or stamping method to apply acrylic paint to canvas and panels, achieving a semi-mechanized application that may closely resemble a magnified photographic halftone. Yet any imagery that emerges is inferred by the viewer. The artist says, “abstract painting remains primary for me. Each painting presents the evidence of a series of decisions enacted in its proximity and coinciding, at certain crucial moments, with its surface.” The artist’s open-ended, improvisational approach facilitates a considerable degree of indeterminacy and accident in the working process. The monoprint mark is a deposit, the residue of a clumsy, imprecise operation. That imprint is all that remains of a protracted and complex action otherwise lost to time. If the paintings are “images,” they represent the process by a kind of synecdoche. The residue denotes the entire procedure, as its pictorial outcome.

Maine has recently adopted the book form as a delivery mechanism for his work on paper. Maine’s handmade books, which he considers “sculptures with pages,” are materially vigorous and rough-hewn, possessing an offhand elegance. Executed in a broad range of materials on various heavyweight papers, the pages are sewn and bound by the artist between hardcover boards. Among the several examples of this exciting new body of work that are included in the exhibition is Book #14-0103 (2014), a massive volume comprising recent drawings and technical experimentation and older, repurposed works in ink, watercolor, acrylic, and collage using found printed matter and original digital output. Poring over this 120-page tome, with its many overlays, gatefolds and eccentricities of design, provides abundant visual and tactile pleasures in its own right, and illuminates the thought and decisions behind the rather more reductive pictorial vocabulary evident in this artist’s work in the medium of painting.

Stephen Maine is a painter, freelance critic, independent curator and teacher who has lived and worked in New York City for over 30 years. His work has recently been seen at Minus Space, Brian Morris Gallery, O K Harris, Parallel Art Space, Sideshow, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Sue Scott Gallery, Kentler International Drawing Space, and Carriage Trade in New York City; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Islip (NY) Art Museum; Samson Projects, Boston; Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Summit; Crane Arts, Philadelphia; Brattleboro (VT) Museum and Art Center; Shiltcamp Gallery at Clark University, Worcester, MA; Art Effect Gallery, Detroit; Riverside (CA) Art Museum; Paris Concret; and Deutscher Künstlerbund Projektraum, Berlin. Maine is a member of American Abstract Artists and the International Association of Art Critics. He received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting in 2000 and was a resident fellow at Yaddo in 2012. His work is in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA Library Special Collections, the New York Public Library, the Phillips Collection, and the Art in Embassies Collection, US Department of State.