JULIAN STANCZAK

March 19 – April 23, 2016
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Opening: Saturday, March 19, 2016 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

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.

JULIAN STANCZAK will be on view from March 19 – April 23, 2016

About Julian Stanczak

Julian Stanczak (Poland, b. 1928) currently resides in Ohio. His early life was marked by enormous personal struggle, and equally by his commitment to an uplifted outlook informed by art and music. Forced into a labor camp in Siberia during World War II, he began his art-making in as a teenage refugee in Uganda where he sought to transmit his experience of the stunning light and landscape of East Africa.  Stanczak arrived in Cleveland, Ohio in 1950, then took his BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art; and his MFA at Yale (1956), as a student of Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli. 

 His paintings have exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Important group shows include The Responsive Eye, MOMA (1965); Site and Insight: An Assemblage of Artists (Curated by Agnes Gund), MOMA/P.S. 1 (2003), Ghosts in the Machine, New Museum, (2012), and currently Geometric Obsession: The American School 1965-2015, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Buenos Aires (MACBA), Argentina (2016).  Major solo exhibitions include Julian Stanczak: 50 Year Retrospective, Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio, (2001) and Line Color Illusion: 40 Years of Collecting, Julian Stanczak, Akron Art Museum, Ohio, (2013). His work is included in the permanent collection of more than 80 institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery, Washington, DC; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.   Julian Stanczak lives and works with his wife, artist Barbara Stanczak in Cleveland, Ohio.

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DIANE ROSENSTEIN