Stephen Maine

Hionas Gallery is pleased to announce that to open its fall 2015 season the gallery will present Stephen Maine: New Paintings, a solo exhibition comprising five remarkable new canvases.

Maine’s pictorial language is distinct, emerging from processes that insist on the concrete material realities of abstract painting. The artist begins each canvas with a single ground color, applied as a glaze. Subsequent colors are added in a relief print-like manner, using elaborate “plates” fabricated with various materials including plywood, extruded foam, rubber floor mats and insulation paneling. This process yields both unique chromatic environments and surprising material impressions, particularly as each printing surface gradually changes with repeated use.

In this new body of work, Maine expands on the possibilities suggested by his recent Halftone paintings, in which pareidolic imprecisions leave viewers perceiving all manner of imagery from the ambiguous stimuli before them. Part procedural, part improvisational, Maine’s evolving method embraces both premeditation and chance occurrences; in the artist’s words, “The residue denotes the entire procedure, as its pictorial outcome.” These outcomes are luminous and chaotic, shifting constellations of surface tension and dense color in which positive and negative space interpenetrate and illusionism vies with surface, facture, and tactility.

Stephen Maine is a painter, art critic, curator, and educator. He earned his BFA in Painting from Indiana University and his MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been seen at 490 Atlantic and Melville House, both in Brooklyn; he has participated in group exhibitions at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; Brian Morris Gallery, NYC; Sideshow Gallery and Parallel Art Space, Brooklyn; Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Vermont; and many others. Maine teaches in the graduate Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and he is a long-time member of the American Abstract Artists. New Paintings marks Maine’s first time exhibiting with Hionas Gallery. He lives and works in Brooklyn.