Julian Stanczak

Color and Constellation

January 15 - February 19, 2005

Stefan Stux Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works covering four decades of the career of pioneering artist Julian Stanczak. This will be Stanczak’s second solo exhibition at Stux Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a foldout brochure with text by noted art critic and historian, Robert C. Morgan.

In the 1950’s Stanczak began to form a unique artistic sensibility founded on the rigorous color experimentation of his teacher Josef Albers, and enlivened by his own intuitive grasp of art’s capacity to express hidden dimensions of the human spirit. His breakthrough New York exhibition took place at the historic Martha Jackson Gallery in 1964. Entitled “Julian Stanczak – Optical Paintings,” it inadvertently helped to coin the name for one of the pivotal movements of that turbulent decade – Op Art. Riding the crest of that wave, along with Bridget Riley and Richard Anuszkiewicz, Stanczak rose to prominence as one of the foremost young painters of the movement. His work was featured in all the major exhibitions of Op Art, including The Responsive Eye at MoMA in 1965, and Stanczak was popularly identified with the movement when his work appeared in both Time and Life magazine articles during the 1960’s.