Stux Gallery Program

The Stux Gallery concentrates on exhibiting mid-career, emerging and well-established artists ranging from painting and photography to sculpture, installation, and performance artwork.  The thrust of Stux Gallery’s overall program is to cover a broad spectrum of artists from the United States, Europe, the Far East, Australia, Asia, and Africa whose work shares an interest in challenging the boundaries of genre and medium, often with a deeply conceptual bent, always with an aesthetically rewarding engagement with the material and formal presentation of the work.

Stefan Stux Gallery – A Brief History

1980 - Present

Originally founded more than twenty-five years ago by Stefan and Linda Stux in Boston in 1980, Stux Gallery first established its international profile in 1986 at its New York gallery on Spring Street in SoHo.  The gallery’s success was recognized early on, with enthusiastic reviews of its emerging artists in the national and international art press, receiving the New York Times’ year-end “Best of New York,” several years in a row.  In this early phase of the gallery, the program emphasized development and promotion of gifted young artists including by now internationally famous artists such as Vik Muniz, Fabian Marcaccio, Lawrence Carroll, Elaine Sturtevant, Doug and Mike Starn and Andres Serrano among others.    

Relocating from SoHo to Chelsea early on in 1996, Stux Gallery continued this distinctive aesthetic program, introducing noteworthy artists that have since become international stars to the international art scene, such as Inka Essenhigh.  More recently, the gallery has been representing additional mid-career and senior artists, such as Dennis Oppenheim, one of the original founders of Land art and Shimon Okshteyn, who since arriving to the United States from the Former Soviet Union in 1980 has exhibited widely in galleries and museums around the world, with recent retrospectives at the State Russian Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, and Orlan, a world-renowned French conceptual and performance artist who addresses Feminist body and identity issues via various physical transformations of her own body complemented by Conceptual photographic and sculptural works.     

These artists are joined by Kuno Gonschior, who was recognized early on in his career with his prominent multi-room installation at Documenta 6 in the 1970’s and whose work is widely regarded as being on par in Europe with such noted artists as Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman and Yayoi Kusama. In addition, the Gallery is pleased to represent artists such as Zigi Ben-Haim, whose bold imagery and dynamic spaces force viewers to examine their own personal relationships within an atmosphere of urban experience in a unique melding of painting and sculpture; International Center of Photography Infinity award winner Tracey Moffatt, an internationally lauded Australian artist well known world wide for her highly effective and compelling photographic and video works; Margaret Evangeline, whose installations, performances and paintings are situated within the Minimalist void left by the artists of the 1960’s, punctures the surface of her works by walking on them or shooting through them with bullets, thus transforming them into contemplative objects; and German artist Joseph Zehrer, whose abstract forms, as well as his often human-like motives embedded in imprecise architectural settings, reveal a mysterious engrossing yet playful world, removed from a specific space and time coordinate.

This program has been balanced with ongoing interest in discovering exciting young talent working in a variety of media.  In painting, this work ranges from Aaron Johnson’s inimitable paintings that evoke an entangled dialogue existing somewhere between critical political commentary and painterly oblivion; Heide Trepanier’s graphically rendered, biomorphic drips; Anna Jóelsdóttir’s abstract and precise renderings of time and space; and Thordis Adalsteinsdottir’s emotionally charged and disturbing representations of inner psychological turmoil. James Busby’s innovative minimal sculptural explorations in obsessively built-up layers of gesso question our perception of space, while Miki Carmi’s monumental portraits offer a contemporary icon for the human condition. Dean Monogenis' skillfully rendered paintings utilize opposing finishes, high gloss and matte, to decontextualize elements of time and space, while Don Porcella’s irreverent painted dreamscapes and ghoulishly playful pipe cleaner sculptures illustrate the humor and absurdity of popular culture.     

The gallery’s historical connections to photography are underscored by Ruud van Empel’s exploration into fantastic and illusionary digitally composed worlds, presenting thoroughly unique photographs that allow viewers a voyeuristic glimpse into unknown and seemingly impossible settings filled with evocatively harmless childlike characters; Artist, publisher and style icon Iké Udé, through a myriad of modalities, laments and celebrates the rise of celebrity journalism. Pairing titalating text with images of high style,  Udé’s post-Warholian approach confuses our conception of historical fact with salacious artistic interpretation; Manabu Yamanka’s stark black-and-white photographs of the elderly, infirmed, and spiritually marginalized beings; Markus Wetzel’s distinctive, digitally invented utopian seascapes, printed by photographic means; Suellen Parker’s scorchingly irreverent exploration of the ego and its commodification, and Lydia Venieri’s digitally manipulated photo-works that deliver a potent punch of hysteria and social criticism of a culture of war and violence.

As part of its ongoing international program, the Gallery has presented Chinese Relativity: Part I (2007), Chinese Relativity: Part II (2008), and Fire Walkers (2008), exhibitions focusing on the current state of Contemporary Art in China, India and the Middle East respectively, featuring such noted artists as Yan Pei Ming, Cai Guo-Qiang, Wei Dong, Zhang Huan, Su Xinping, Reena Saini Kallat, Chitra Ganesh, and Sheela Gowda, amongst others. 

As a result of this interest, the Gallery has added 2 of the leading Chinese contemporary artists to its roster, Wei Dong and Zhang Xiaotao. Entering the United States from China in 1991, Wei Dong, one of China’s premier Contemporary painters, embraces his preoccupation with the root of erotic desires much repressed in Mao’s China. The artist’s politically rooted paintings question political and social taboos, resulting in canvases depicting grandiose explorations of the flesh and its desires. In March of 2009, the Gallery will present the premier solo exhibition of Zhang Xiaotao, a master Chinese Contemporary painter whose paintings and meticulously ambitious animated films are a consequence of the heterogeneous state of evolution of our world and of the everyday, clearly illustrating a China that is spiritually and socio-economically in a state of transition.  Xiaotao’s works are featured in numerous international public and private collections, including the preeminent collections of Uli Sigg, Charles Saatchi, The Guangdong Art Museum, China, The Kunst Akademie Muenster, Germany, Fondazione Cassa Di Risparmioin Bologna, Italy, and the Shenzhen Art Museum, China, to name but a few.

Throughout the years the Gallery has fostered international relationships and collaborations over the years with an array of international galleries, such as Krinzinger Gallery (Vienna), Micheline Swajcer Gallery (Antwerp), Mayor Rowan Gallery (London), Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery (Australia), Seibu Gallery (Tokyo/Oasaka), Pilar Parra (Madrid), Jacob Karpio (Costa Rica), Galerie Christian Nagel (Köln/Berlin), Gallery Terra Tokyo (Japan), Kobayashi Gallery (Japan), and many others.


The aesthetic vision that binds this broad array of artists together has more to do with their deep intelligence and commitment to innovation and conceptual art, than any particular formal characteristics.  The goal of the gallery is, ultimately, to present challenging work that rewards complex, multifaceted consideration by the viewer. At it’s current location since 2004 in a newly refurbished, 4,000 sq. ft. ground floor space on 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea, the Gallery finds itself at the epicenter of New York’s gallery scene.

In 2002, the Stux Gallery welcomed Andrea Schnabl as an additional Partner and Director.  Ms. Schnabl, who hails from Germany, spearheaded the relocation of the Gallery to its current location; she brings with her a refined expertise of European Contemporary Art and Culture. The Stux Gallery exhibition program takes full advantage of this location, presenting the work of its artists in its prominent, expansive space.