NEW YORK, NY.- Kristen Lorello presents Maria Stabio’s second solo exhibition at the gallery featuring paintings on canvas that celebrate the culture and landscape of the Philippines through the artist’s unique, diasporic lens. The exhibition unfolds in the two main rooms of the gallery. The viewing room features a related group presentation entitled ‘Local Color,’ with six works by six artists—including Stabio—who meet regularly to study color.

Stabio’s paintings are accretions of cropped figurative, landscape, and atmospheric elements, animated by vivacious colors and multidirectional patterning. Her works express the joy of exploring one’s own cultural identity through travel, research, and relationships at home and abroad. Born in San Francisco, educated in Boston and New York, and now living and working in northeastern Pennsylvania, Stabio makes frequent visits to the Philippines, the country where her mother is from. Her imagery draws from cultural symbols and aspects of Philippine cuisine, landscape, and weather. Tempestuous monsoons, volcanic lava, lush plants, and the egg, are elements of place embedded into the artist’s mind that appear time and again in her works. Using stencils placed over the canvas and sprayed through in many layers, Stabio achieves a dimensional print-like surface where saturated colors mix and misalign in patterns that are equally energized and ethereal. In the new series on view, the artist incorporates lace as a stencil for the first time. The material interests her for its religious associations, while it creates undulating, water-like patterns when painted through.

Stabio honors indigenous Philippine traditions in her contemporary paintings, finding inspiration in the woodcarvings of nationally renowned sculptor Jose P. Alcantara (1911-2005), whose large-scale carvings of folkloric and biblical themes are found in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila. She closely studied a collection of anthropological essays entitled, ‘Myths and Symbols: Philippines,’ written in the late 1970s by a US-educated, Filipino Jesuit priest and scholar Father Francisco Radaza Demetrio, a pioneer of the study and preservation of indigenous Philippine traditions. In the essays, Demetrio treats traditional beliefs and symbols as complex systems that continue within modern religion. Stabio’s paintings include images of bamboo, lightening bolts, sun, and water, referenced in Demetrio’s pre-Colonial stories, which she recontextualizes through flat, dimensional color, and cropping. For Stabio, the return to myth, origin, and spirituality provides an avenue to a more imaginative and elemental reality, offering a reprieve from the complexities of contemporary life, and honoring the natural processes of birth, death, extinction, and movement through time.

Maria Stabio received an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2012, and a BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2007. She was born in 1985 in San Francisco, CA, and lives and works in Barnesville, Pennsylvania. Stabio is the owner of the Bischoff Inn in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania and the founder of the Bischoff Inn’s Micro-Residency for artists. Stabio's works have been exhibited at Cabin Contemporary, Pottsville, PA, The Barn Project, Boothbay, Maine, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY, Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY, and Pen and Brush, New York, NY, among other venues. She has completed artist residencies at Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY, 2023, and ChaNorth Residency, Pine Plains, NY, 2019. In 2012 she was awarded an Artist in Residence Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, where she was a resident artist and adjunct faculty member for one year.