Julian Stanczak

March 19 - April 30, 2016

Overview

Diane Rosenstein is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Julian Stanczak. This is Stanczak’s first gallery exhibition in Los Angeles in forty years, and includes eighteen paintings made between 1968-2009. More than half the paintings in this show have never before been exhibited or not shown in decades. Julian Stanczak was born in Poland and lives in Cleveland.

Donald Judd, in his review of Julian Stanczak’s solo show (in 1964 at Martha Jackson), wrote: “Optical effects are one thing, a narrow phenomenon, and color effects are another, a wide range. Op art.” Art history credits Donald Judd with coining the term “Op Art” in this review and identifies Julian Stanczak, along with Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, as a pioneer. The following year, his paintings were shown alongside Josef Albers (his former teacher), Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell in the Museum Of Modern Art’s influential exhibition, The Responsive Eye.

Working with acrylics, Stanczak creates meticulous compositions that center on the complexity of color relationships and their effect on forms and space. The artist has also written about the impact on his painting of his life as a refugee in Uganda, and the simultaneous beauty of the African landscape. “When I see the dramatic shapes and colors of nature, observe their power, it triggers in me the need to translate these primordial forces.”

These dazzling perceptual abstractions reveal an intuitive understanding of color and musical composition. In essence and outlook they are emotional landscapes, an effort to transcend the surface containment of the painting as object and connect with the viewer in a perceptual way.