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Stephen Westfall cover Reclining Harlequin 2015 78 x 66 inches oil and alkyd on canvas back cover Farewell to the Groves 2016 30 x 24 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Stephen Westfall Crispy Fugue State May 12July 30 2016 opening reception Thursday May 12 68 pm Lennon Weinberg Inc. 514 West 25 Street New York NY 10001 212-941-0012 www.lennonweinberg.com The Future Advances and Recedes 2015 78 x 66 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Oracle and Canterbury 2014 site specific wall paintings. Art OMI Ghent New York. Over the course of the last decade I wanted my work to address architecture more directly and wall paintings seemed a way to fuse paintings to architectural scale. I regard the wall paintings now as being as essential to my artistic practice as my paintings on canvas and paper which are bound by more conventional notions of portability and transferability. stephen westfall Stephen Westfall has been generating ideas for wall paintings since 2007 when he was invited to work at Solvent Space a site for experimentation in Richmond Virginia. On that occasion and for the installations that fol- lowed during the next six years in galleries and elsewhere the composi- tions of his wall-based works tended to be derived from already existing oil paintings. Even when they werent as in the wall paintings created at the American Academy in Rome in 2010 an overall structure was typically contained within the perimeters of the format in a way that had long been characteristic of his oil paintings even as his focus shifted from rectilinear grids to an emphasis on bold and multi-colored diagonals. In 2013 the prospect of a large wall painting commission required a different approach. As Westfall addressed the proposal for a sequence of six soaring twenty-two foot vertical walls he decided to slice and re- proportion segments from recent compositions expanding them to the scale of the architecture. Sometimes he retained compositional anchors at the edge but often and importantly he unmoored the structures in a way that began to imply fields that extend beyond the physical boundar- ies of the format. One of the structures he looked to for the project was a dazzlingly colorful diamond patterned painting. In the process of making one of a still ongoing series of harlequin paintings he noticed that the white space around the diamonds prior to filling them all with color breathed air into the composition. The inclusion of expanses of white created a space that Westfall describes as mentholated and this effect was incorporated in his largest wall paintings to date the forty-five foot long Canterbury cre- ated for Art OMI and Stars and Candy Wrappers which ran a hundred feet around all four walls of the Nachman Gallery in the museum at the Univer- sity of California Santa Barbara. They also commissioned Argus a twenty- five foot work to fill an outdoor wall at the museum. The repercussions of these two new aspects that emerged in the recent wall paintingsthe uncontained compositional field and the aera- tion of the color system along with a new tweak involving a subtly desta- bilizing skew to the picture planecan now be seen in the central group of large new paintings included in the current exhibition. They represent a striking advance in a body of work that is simultaneously intellectual pastoral zen and pop indebted to the likes to Mondrian Matisse John McLaughlin and Stuart Davis yet thoroughly forward-looking and opti- mistically inclined. The paintings in the exhibition demonstrate a certain brand of agile pictorial thinking that has always exemplified the best of Stephen Westfalls work. jill weinberg adams New York 2016 Argus 2015 permanent wall painting. Museum of Art Design and ArchitectureUniversity of California Santa Barbara. Aeolian 2014 72 x 66 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Delta 2016 84 x 30 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Three Kings 2015 66 x 78 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Bower 2016 38 x 36 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Cortona 2015 42 x 34 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Sunshower 2016 26 x 24 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Fugue 2016 36 x 36 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Amors 2016 84 x 60 inches oil and alkyd on canvas Stephen Westfall b. 1953 received his MFA in 1978 from the University of California Santa Barbara. His first solo show was at Tracey Garet in New Yorks East Village in 1984. Exhibitions followed at Daniel Newburg Gallery New York Galerie Paal Munich Germany Galerie Wilma Lock St. Gallen Switzerland Andre Emmerich Gallery New York and Galerie Zurcher Paris France. Westfall has been represented by Lennon Weinberg since 1997 and has had seven exhibitions at their locations in Soho and Chelsea in New York. He had his first show with David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe New Mexico in 2015 and has recently collaborated with Polly Apfelbaum on exhi- bitions presented at Clement Schneider in Bonn Germany in 2014 and at The Suburban in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 2015 where he showed rugs recently woven under his direction in Oaxaca Mexico. Westfalls work has been included in several important thematic exhi- bitions of abstract paintings including Conceptual Abstraction at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 2012. Survey exhibitions of his work were presented at Colgate University in 2000 and Western Carolina University in 1999. He installed his first monumental wall paintings at Solvent Space in Richmond Virginia in 2007 followed by others at the American Academy in Rome in 2010 and a permanent work installed at the Mason Gross Per- forming Arts Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick New Jersey in 2014. An exhibition at Art OMI in 2014 featured two very large wall paint- ings. He was commissioned by the Museum of Art Architecture and Design at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2015 to create a permanent outdoor wall painting and a second large work for the museums Nachman Gallery. A wall painting installation in the ATT Lobby at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio Texas remains on view through July 2016. Works by the artist are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York the Kemper Museum in Kansas City the Loui- siana Museum in Humlebaek Denmark the Munson Williams Proctor Museum in Utica New York the Baltimore Museum of Art the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the UBS Art Collection. Westfall has received grants and awards from the National Endow- ment for the Arts the American Academy of Arts and Letters the Nancy Graves Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He received a Rome Prize Fellowship and spent a year at the American Academy in Rome dur- ing 2009 and 2010. He is a professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and in the graduate program at Bard University. He is a Contributing Editor at Art in America. The Holy Forest 2015 site specific wall painting. The McNay Art Museum San Antonio Texas. Lennon Weinberg Inc.