Lisa Stefanelli

EXHIBITION NOTES

Lisa Stefanelli
Dec 5 – Dec 29, 2017

New York artist Lisa Stefanelli’s sensuous surfaces belie their time spent in an auto-body shop. There her panels are repeatedly sprayed with glossy automotive paint to provide the ground for her meticulously hand-painted, sinuous linear forms that loop, twine and spill toward each panel’s edge. Expansive and luminous as if backlit or glimpsed skyward, Stefanelli’s interconnected markings telegraph the fluid movement of the artist’s gesture; her calligraphic process a collaborative fusion of industrial technology and a precise handling of paint. The artist also pays homage in form to her years as a competitive figure skater; an eloquent visual record of the circuitous mark-making dance left behind in the ice. Yet, Stefanelli states, “The underlying pursuit of my studio practice is the possibility of being simultaneously involved and uninvolved in complexity. Elements of the natural world are primary in informing the paths and trajectories of the paintings’ visual language along with the cultural clutter we live in daily such as signage, sound/music, advertising and popular culture. There is a joy in the confusion we live in and my practice chases that joy.  My work is elaborate and complicated while yearning to avoid the very entanglements it embodies.”

Lisa Stefanelli has a B.A.  from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work in the permanent collections of the United States Department of State, Washington DC, The West Collection, Oaks, PA, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA, The Mondstudio Collection at the Kunstmuseum, Berne, Switzerland, The Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY and The Wynn Collection, Las Vegas, NV.