SANTA FE, NM.- David Richard Gallery is presenting Julian Stanczak: Dynamic Fields, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition for the artist. The exhibition will remain on view through March 17, 2018 at the Santa Fe venue located at 1570 Pacheco Street, Suite E2, Santa Fe, New Mexico. A digital catalogue is available online.

The current exhibition, Dynamic Fields, explores the “impact” of Stanczak’s paintings on the viewer and the sensations they create from the color palettes and compositions. Stanczak was interested in creating vibrant works that convey not only energy, but the sensation of movement and motion within the paintings. Selections from certain bodies of work, such as his “bound boxes”, “diagonal constructs” as well as more lyrical and rhythmic compositions from his “grass” paintings demonstrate how he used a variety of methods, including angled and diagonal lines and gradients of color to achieve his objectives.

Stanczak’s paintings were inspired by his love of nature, but color was his passion, how the palette of the paintings could transform the energy of a space and effect the mood of the viewers. He was interested in developing methods and approaches using simple lines and geometric shapes as well as repetition of such elements at angles of 45 degrees or more to suggest direction and movement. When combined with value gradients of colors or ranges of saturation, the painting surfaces softly undulated like a wave or pivoted on an edge. The artist was most interested in how the viewer experienced his work, their reaction and interpretation. His creations were always elegant and sophisticated, meticulously painted with attention given to every detail.

The Gallery’s three prior solo exhibitions for Stanczak focused on specific bodies of work. The first solo exhibition in 2011, Elusive Transparencies, was a survey of what the artist referred to as “see-through” paintings—overlapping planes of color that looked as though they were floating in space, conveying depth and perspective—that were very important to him and spanned nearly his entire career. Grids and Planes, in 2012, was the second solo exhibition that presented classic grid structures with endless gradients of color that, depending upon the palette, either created a portal to access a world beyond or the center of the grid seemed to lift off the wall and intervene in the gallery space. The third solo exhibition, Lineal Pathways, in 2014 explored Stanczak’s return in the 1990s and 2000s to his more reductive approach of using just lines and a simple palette of only 2 or 3 colors to create illusory topographical surfaces that looked as though silk cloth had been draped over an array of structures on a flat surface. These were evocative of the artist’s works from the 1960s and demonstrated his continued interest in and mastery of creating the most impact with the greatest economy of means.

Julian Stanczak was born in Borownica, Poland in 1928. After a challenging childhood that included moves to Siberia, the Middle East and Africa, he and his family finally moved outside London where he studied at the Borough Polytechnic Institute. After immigrating to the US in 1950s, Stancazak studied with Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli at Yale University where he earned his MFA in 1956. His impressive career includes over 100 solo exhibitions across the US and internationally. His artworks have been included in many important group shows such as the seminal exhibitions in 1965 that established the perceptual art movement, Vibrations Eleven, at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York and The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Stanczak’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of 80 museums and public collections, among them, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Gallery of Art and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.) and Victoria and Albert Museum (London, England). His artworks are also featured in many important public and private collections. Julian Stanczak lived and worked in Seven Hills, Ohio, where he died March 25, 2017.