Stephen Westfall
Stephen Westfall
Stephen Westfall
NEW YORK
Photo of artist © Daisy Craddock, 2021
FRONTISPIECE (AND ABOVE) :
Argus, 2015 Latex on panel on wall, 10'8" x 25'5" Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Stephen Westfall: Persephone Faye Hirsch
What is this talisman of color, this singular virtue of the visible that makes it, held at the end of the gaze, nonetheless much more than a correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation of its own sovereign existence? —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 1968 Observers of Stephen Westfall’s paintings have often commented on both the ubiquity and variability of the grids that formed their basis from the 1980s onward. They were never “The Grid,” that fundamental modernist trope, but always grids, plural, relative, denizens of a postmodern world. In a 2006 interview, John Yau characterized the fallout of inflection in Westfall’s grids as imparting a “vulnerability” to the work, and Westfall agreed, responding that it was as if “the whole thing could tremble and be knocked over.”1 In fact, the words had felt both eloquent and apt, given the myriad ways Westfall compromised his grids, whether via formal tweaks and torques or the admittance of a referentiality that nudged his abstraction into the realm of what he called “sign-culture.” The painter Amy Sillman set his paintings in motion: “They oscillate by means of their famously jiggling grids, with edges akimbo, blinking on and off, back and forth, these paintings just won’t stay put.”2 It was perhaps inevitable,
Argus, 2015 Latex on panel on wall, 10'8" x 25'5" Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara
then, that Westfall’s grids would, at last, be cast aside, at least for a time. As the artist has said, rigid systems can be “a form of soul murder. The system—if there is a system there—should be a doorway to a reopening.”3 Each of Westfall’s shows, then, which he mounted every two or three years at the late Lennon, Weinberg gallery in New York from 1999 to 2018, had a certain coherence, a particular set of variations on a theme, and from one show to the next that theme morphed to a greater or lesser degree. He told Rob KaiserSchatzlein in 2015, “Every three to five years there’s a real break and shift, but that doesn’t mean that what I was doing before that stops. In the overlap there may be another idea.”4 Does the “break and shift” between his 2018 Lennon, Weinberg show, “The Patchwork Veil,” and now feel more radical because it comprises a longer stretch of three years? For in this exhibition, Westfall’s first at Alexandre, he has pretty much abandoned his grid. It survives more through implication, a ghostly existence informed by the memory of what came before rather than what is actually there today. The elusiveness of the works constitutes yet another iteration of (and perhaps riposte to) hard-edge abstraction, such that the term as usual feels grossly inadequate. In this, the work of Westfall’s maturity might be tied to that of his contemporary, Harriet Korman, another artist who remains faithful to the genre—if you can call it that—while subverting it, and granting it the kind of subtle ease that comes from decades of canny exploration and implicit critique. The abandonment by Westfall is more or less complete in paintings done between 2019 and 2021. Extreme, for example, in the tall vertical, By Right of
Perasma II, 2018 Laminated glass, 8'6" x 66' NYCT 30th Avenue Station Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design Photo: James and Karla Murray
the Wood, in which, as far as I can tell, there is not a single set of parallels to be found in a rollicking mosaic of geometric shapes, mainly quadrilaterals, each a different color from the one adjacent. The neatest diagonal is formed by a strip of shapes extending downward from the top left toward the right edge, but a bigger countervailing force is downward from right to left, beginning at the top right corner. The powerful clash of directions seems to fracture the whole, though its many panes come to rest, acrobatically, on the apex of a broad-based ocher triangle at the very bottom. Westfall is, after all, the heir to a long line of hard-edge abstractionists, without a trace of expressionist storm. The absence of parallels in By Right of the Wood suggests that the various shapes continue beyond the frame into infinity, and the effect is almost of spotlights crisscrossing the surface—or, in keeping with the title, the sort of raking, mutable light activated by the moving boughs of a forest. Here Westfall tilts ever so slightly toward landscape, and indeed, one wonders whether the easing of rigidity and a more generous attitude toward space might not have something to do with an immersion in his Hudson Valley home during the pandemic, an acknowledgement of “the vines, the yellow line on the highway, the telephone poles, the light of the Hudson Valley and the Mohawk Valley,” as he describes that world, redolent as well of a specific history of American painting.5 The acrobatic quality of the composition in By Right of the Wood is present in a number of other recent works, which often feel as though they are tumbling out of the frame and into our space. Three quadrilaterals wobble down the center of another vertical painting, Song; they are anchored between thick
Perasma II, 2018 (detail) Laminated glass, 8’6” x 66’ NYCT 30th Avenue Station Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design Photo: James and Karla Murray
zigzag brackets of ocher and green along the vertical edges of the frame but, again, delicately land on the apex of a decentered orange triangle at the bottom. Westfall has brought a harlequin pattern to bear in the past, and here it is again—conjuring Picasso, for one, and producing a spirited performativity within this group of works. An even more unstable arrangement prevails in Atelier 1, a bifurcated composition in which the two halves are divided and activated by an isosceles triangle that thrusts up the center like a dagger. To the left are just four big shapes dominated by what feels like a huge ultramarine quadrilateral; to the right, the raking diagonal strips of smaller shapes that, again, seem to imply infinity in their lack of resolution within the frame. The two sides are not so much balanced as engaged in a kind of parallel play—call it “mixed dominance,” a condition related to ambidexterity that Westfall lives with, along with other perceptual challenges. “I’m dyslexic, I have mixed dominance, I have terrible speech problems, and I’m synesthetic,” he explains.6 Also of note in Atelier I: the striking intrusion of tan and pink, which appear in many of the works as incidental characters of surprising delicacy. Tan, pink and blue—Picasso again: the beach paintings of the late 1920s, as Westfall told me. The late Stephen Mueller, another great colorist, wrote about Westfall: “What might be just another skillful hard-edge painting is often made magical and always musical by his concentrated mixing and application of amazingly specific and odd hues.”7 While Westfall usually decides much of the composition and basic palette first, his patient layering of the paint assures a specific richness and organicism to the colors. He has said there might be as many as eight coats
The Holy Forest, 2015 wall painting, 16' x 38' AT&T Lobby, The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas On view August 6, 2015–July 31, 2016
of paint, which allow for a subtle shifting of color, and that he’s finished “when there is a kind of creaminess to the light and to the way the colors are fitting together. Which also corresponds to a fulness of surface.”8 In Persephone’s Lava Light, cascading shapes in ocher, two different oranges, dark green, blue, pink and gray are almost audible, like the fake thunder in a Renaissance opera. They frame a zigzagging purple shape and in turn are bracketed by blue and olive green at the outer margins. The title conjures at once the constantly metamorphosing colored blobs in a lava lamp and the mystery of the underworld, and indeed the purple is at once a light beam and a shadow, the whole lush palette pressed into a downward trajectory of shapes. The composition seems to slide earthward, the colors catching hold only to slip away from one another. Perhaps this is what Westfall means when he speaks of color as extending surface into infinity. It is a phenomenon that exceeds the picture plane as such; Westfall’s colors breathe within and upon a surface that has no limitations. The artist mentions Zeno’s Paradoxes as a source of inspiration, and indeed, one can almost see an illustration in these paintings of the “arrow paradox,” an unresolved condition in which everything is at once at rest and in motion along a trajectory. In all the paintings, generous blocks of color arrest the eye yet, in their being arranged with skewed meeting points and in raking strips, they everywhere conjure a defiance of the limitations of hard edge and frame. “Planar abstraction seeks to invoke infinity,” Westfall said to me; famously provocative in conversation and teaching, his utterances on painting register aphoristically,
Oracle, 2014 wall painting, 13' x 26' OMI International Arts Center, Ghent, New York
Canterbury, 2014 wall painting, 15' x 75' OMI International Arts Center, Ghent, New York
forcing one to ponder meanings long after an interview ceases. “Color is both extensive and infinite.” He speaks of the atmospherics of Agnes Martin, an early love, and the ambiguity of Blinky Palermo. And “God’s consistency in icons.”9 Certainly he is aiming in these recent paintings for something found in icons that might be called presence, or perhaps an absence that implies presence. Their refusal to resolve allows them to conjure a beyond that refuses definition, even as they look at first glance like the most secure of entities. The haptic stimulus of their chroma and the kinetic dynamism of their compositions ensure their physicality even as they rely on sheer opticality for their effect. The implication is also of a grand scale, and perhaps in this Westfall is echoing the corporeal demands of his recent architectural mural commissions, like the 25-foot wall painting Argus at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2015), his alma mater, in which squares of color seemed to bounce around like a giant, body-embracing screen-saver; or the permanent installation of laminated glass at the 30th Avenue elevated subway stop in Astoria, Queens (2018), where squares of color are arranged so that, as you move along the corridor, they liberate themselves from gridded rectangular metal frames—a prefiguration, perhaps, of freedom to come. (He is also, as of this writing, preparing a mural for the new Alexandre Gallery on Grand Street to coincide with his show.) In a sense, Westfall is compacting the experience one has moving through a space into the confines of an easel painting, such that we must experience it as something larger, out-of-bounds. In Spring (2021), the colored tesserae at the center, braced
by a ragged ocher and orange, appear to shift direction as they move through the work, down and up, backward and forward, as if testing the limits of what a painting can encompass. As with mosaic, the painting is occupied by the color, expanding and contracting and implying our own coextensive bodily relationship to it. Nimble, even joyous, are Westfall’s gouaches; one senses the relative freedom from the painstaking process of the large canvases, which can take months to complete—never taped, always drawn by hand, then painted over and over in layers using colors warmed by the inclusion of small amounts of their complementaries. By contrast, the gouaches dry quickly, and in them we can see the artist working out all manner of compositional and chromatic issues. The harlequin pattern surfaces in works like Never a Clean Break, while Light Web brings in the sense of light beams traversing the surface. The bending, toppling spaces we see in some of the large oils are there, as well, in Summer of Oddstodds and Wanderloo, and the more philosophically titled The Limits of Surfaces are Lines. Westfall told me that, in abandoning the grid, he is revisiting a more ambiguous, visibly hand-wrought hard-edge abstraction, something closer to what he was doing in his early years. In his gouaches, one senses it as a playful return. The paradox is that, in pulling away the scaffolding and allowing his forms a more organic freedom, Westfall now makes his paintings look less vulnerable than in the past, more confident and lithe. Sillman noted, about earlier work, “These
are not vertiginous spaces; they don’t tilt or whirl, dip or tumble.”10 Perhaps all of us who write about Westfall should prepare ourselves for the inevitable shift. “Tilt, tumble and dip” are an apt opening to a list of actions for his latest forms, which extend the bounds, once again, of an already tireless inflection of that surprisingly elastic invention of the past century, hard-edge abstraction. 1 2 3 4
5 6 7
8 9 10
“Stephen Westfall with John Yau: Art in Conversation,” Brooklyn Rail, April 2006. https:// brooklynrail.org/2006/04/art/stephen-westfall-with-john-yau Amy Sillman, Stephen Westfall: Selected Paintings 2000-2011, exh cat., Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, 2008, n.p Westfall with John Yau. Rob Kaiser-Schatzlein, “Stephen Westfall in Industry City,” Two Coats of Paint, December 13, 2015. https://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2015/12/interview-stephen-westfall-in-industry.html Harry McFann, “Stephen Westfall: Environment,” video (two minutes), 2021. https:// www.alexandregallery.com/stephen-westfall Stephen Westfall with Rob Kaiser-Schatzlein. Stephen Mueller, Stephen Westfall at Lennon, Weinberg, Art in America, April 2009, accessed at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51e5921ee4b0c6df9a7cb5df/t/5d794d4b8634a44f99e2f0d9/1568230732630/2009_AiA.pdf . Stephen Westfall with Rob Kaiser-Schatzlein. Otherwise unattributed remarks were made to me in conversation with Stephen Westfall, June 1, 2021. Sillman, 2008.
Faye Hirsch is an art historian and critic based in New York. She is co-author of a forthcoming book about the Skowhegan residency program, 1946-2021.
New Paintings
Persephone’s Lava Lite, 2021
Spring, 2021
Samba da Lua, 2021
Eurydice, 2021
Atelier I, 2018–20
Little Tango, 2021
Big Tango, 2021
Atelier II, 2021
Song, 2021
By Right of the Wood, 2020
Vale, 2020
Necklace, 2019
Treasure, 2019
Glide, 2019
Westward Wind, 2019
Punctae, 2019
Delta, 2016
Wild Card, 2018
Surfacing, 2018
Angle, 2018
Sorcerer, 2018
Tune in Tomorrow, 2018
Solid Gone, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas, 72 × 18 inches Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York: Hassam, Speicher, Betts & Symons Funds, 2019
Jubilee, 2018
After Sunrise, 2018
Selected Works on Paper
Daybroken, 2021
Never a Clean Break, 2021
Sword of Canticles, 2021
Wanderloo, 2021
Summer of Oddstodds, 2021
Mystery Train, 2021
For S.P., 2021
Mooner by Lamplight, 2021
The Limits of Surfaces are Lines, 2021
Vale II, 2020
Embracing Diamonds, 2020
Northern Boulevard, 2020
Charmed, 2020
Concorde, 2020
Light Web, 2020
Samba, 2016–2019
Reclining Harlequin, 2016–19
Oaxaca, 2016
Oaxaca, 2016–19
Selected Earlier Paintings
Three Kings, 2015
Reclining Harlequin, 2015
Jewel Curtain, 2015
Cortona, 2015
Demimonde, 2014
Time Tells Us What to Do, 2013
Sandalwood, 2013 oil and alkyd on canvas, 30 x 24 inches Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara
High Plains, 2012
Nature Boy, 2012
Blood Diamond, 2010
My Beautiful Laundrette, 2008
Jerome, 2006
Look Around, 2006
Canon, 2002 oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches National Academy of Design, New York. Gift of Stephen Westfall, 2009
Lush Life, 2002
Thaw, 2001 oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York: Hassam, Speicher, Betts & Symons Funds, 2002
In the Trees, 1998
Shining Day, 1994
Ponticino, 1987 oil on canvas, 60 x 42 inches Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York
Checklist Persephone’s Lava Lite, 2021 oil on canvas 247⁄8 x 187⁄8 inches
Song, 2021 oil and alkyd on canvas 72 x 24 inches
Spring, 2021 oil on canvas 2815⁄16 x 2113⁄16 inches
By Right of the Wood, 2020 oil and alkyd on canvas 72 x 24 inches
Samba da Lua, 2021 oil and alkyd on canvas 45 x 38 inches
Vale, 2020 oil and alkyd on canvas 28 x 21 inches
Eurydice, 2021 oil and alkyd on canvas 28 x 22 inches
Necklace, 2019 oil and alkyd on canvas 28 x 21 inches
Atelier I, 2018–20 oil and alkyd on canvas 36 x 33 inches
Treasure, 2019 oil and alkyd on canvas 31 x 31 inches
Little Tango, 2021 oil on canvas 2415⁄16 x 2015⁄16 inches
Glide, 2019 oil and alkyd on canvas 32 x 26 inches
Big Tango, 2021 oil and alkyd on canvas 84 x 72 inches
Westward Wind, 2019 oil and alkyd on canvas 26 x 36 inches
Atelier II, 2021 oil on linen 84 x 72 inches
Punctae, 2019 oil and alkyd on canvas 60 x 36 inches
Delta, 2016 oil and alkyd on canvas 84 x 30 inches
After Sunrise, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas 413⁄4 x 493⁄4 inches
Wild Card, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas 72 x 36 inches
Daybroken, 2021 gouache on paper 12¼ x 9 inches
Surfacing, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas 31 x 31 inches
Never a Clean Break, 2021 gouache on paper 12¼ x 9 inches
Angle, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas 30 x 40 inches
Sword of Canticles, 2021 gouache on paper 12¼ x 9 inches
Sorcerer, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas 72 x 36 inches
Wanderloo, 2021 gouache on paper 14 x 10 inches
Tune in Tomorrow, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas 60 x 36 inches
Summer of Oddstodds, 2021 gouache on paper 14 x 10 inches
Solid Gone, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas, 72 × 18 inches Santa Barbara Museum of Art Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York Hassam, Speicher, Betts & Symons Funds, 2019
Mystery Train, 2021 gouache on paper 11¾ x 11¾ inches For S.P., 2021 gouache on paper 121⁄8 x 16 inches
Jubilee, 2018 oil and alkyd on canvas 72 x 36 inches
Mooner by Lamplight, 2021 gouache on paper 121⁄8 x 16 inches
The Limits of Surfaces are Lines, 2021 gouache on paper 121⁄8 x 16 inches
Oaxaca, 2016 gouache on paper 163⁄4 x 163⁄4 inches
Vale II, 2020 gouache on paper 12 x 9 inches
Oaxaca, 2016–19 gouache on paper 121⁄4 x 9 inches
Embracing Diamonds, 2020 gouache on paper 14 x 10 inches
Three Kings, 2015 oil and alkyd on canvas 66 x 78 inches
Northern Boulevard, 2020 gouache on paper 12¼ x 9 inches
Reclining Harlequin, 2015 oil and alkyd on canvas 78 x 66 inches
Charmed, 2020 gouache on paper 11¾ x 11¾ inches
Jewel Curtain, 2015 oil and alkyd on canvas 75 x 50 inches
Concorde, 2020 gouache on paper 16¼ x 12¼ inches
Cortona, 2015 oil and alkyd on canvas 42 x 34 inches
Light Web, 2020 gouache on paper 12 x 11 inches
Demimonde, 2014 oil and alkyd on canvas 30 x 30 inches
Samba, 2016-2019 gouache on paper 16 x 10 inches
Time Tells Us What to Do, 2013 oil and alkyd on canvas 72 x 72 inches
Reclining Harlequin, 2016–19 gouache on paper 12¼ x 9 inches
Sandalwood, 2013 oil and alkyd on canvas, 30 x 24 inches Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara High Plains, 2012 oil and alkyd on canvas 48 x 36 inches Nature Boy, 2012 oil and alkyd on canvas 60 x 80 inches Blood Diamond, 2010 oil and alkyd on canvas 23½ x 23½ inches My Beautiful Laundrette, 2008 oil on canvas 30 x 36 inches Jerome, 2006 oil and alkyd on canvas 60 x 60 inches Look Around, 2006 oil and alkyd on canvas 48 x 60 inches Canon, 2002 oil on canvas 60 x 60 inches National Academy of Design, New York Gift of Stephen Westfall, 2009
Lush Life, 2002 oil and alkyd on canvas 60 x 72 inches Thaw, 2001 oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York: Hassam, Speicher, Betts & Symons Funds, 2002 In the Trees, 1998 oil and alkyd on canvas 58 x 72 inches Shining Day, 1994 oil on canvas 60 x 60 inches Ponticino, 1987 oil on canvas, 60 x 42 inches Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York
The Holy Forest, 2015 wall painting, 16’ x 38’ AT&T Lobby, The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas On view August 6, 2015–July 31, 2016
Stephen Westfall was born in Schenectady, New York in 1953 and grew up in San Francisco. He began painting in the early 1970s while attending the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where he received his BA in art and literature and MFA in studio art. During his education he was exposed first-hand to the Bay Area Figurative School and the LA Light and Space painters, and committed himself to abstraction after viewing the traveling Agnes Martin survey at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1973, and hearing her speak. The same year he began writing art criticism for Artweek, then the only art magazine on the West Coast. He has continued to write about art and is a long running contributing editor to Art in America. He moved to New York in 1980 and participated in the East Village scene, having his first solo exhibition with Tracey Garet Gallery in 1984. He has subsequently had over 50 solo exhibitions in the US and Europe. His work is represented in numerous public collections. Westfall began making full-scale wall paintings in 2007 and has permanent work installed at UC Santa Barbara, Rutgers University, and the 30th Street MTA station in Astoria, Queens. His wall paintings have also been the subject of exhibitions at Solvent Space in Richmond, Virginia; the McNay Museum in San Antonio, Texas; The Museum of Art, Architecture & Design at UC Santa Barbara; and Art OMI in upstate New York. In 2019, the 30th Street Station project, Perasma I & II, and Dappleganger, was included in the four MTA stations that collectively were selected as among the best public art installations of the year by the Public Art Network Year in Review. The same four stations also won an Excelsior Award from the American Institute of Architects. Westfall has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Nancy Graves Fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, and two awards each from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 2009–10 and is a member of the National Academy of Design. He was an instructor at the School of Visual Arts from 1985 to 2005, a resident teacher at the Skowhegan School in 1994, a Distinguished Chair at Colgate University in 1999, the Class of 1939 Fellow at Princeton in 2005, and a lecturer and co-chair of the painting program at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College from 1989 to 2020. He is currently a Professor of Visual Art at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey where he has taught since 2006.
This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition “Stephen Westfall: Persephone” and marks the gallery’s first one-person exhibition of Stephen Westfall’s work since beginning to represent him in 2019. The show remains on view November 4 through December 22, 2021 at 291 Grand Street, New York 10002.
Cover: Atelier II, 2021
Catalogue © Alexandre Fine Art Inc. Images © Stephen Westfall Photography: Maria Stabio Photographic Production: Maria Stabio Essay © Faye Hirsch Photo of Stephen Westfall © Daisy Craddock Editorial Production: Emma Crumbley, Marie Evans, Mary Shah, and Maria Stabio Design: Lawrence Sunden, Inc., Harrington Park, New Jersey Printing: The Studley Press, Dalton, Massachusetts
No portion of this catalogue, images or text may be reproduced, either in printed or electronic form, without the expressed written permission of the gallery.