NEW YORK, NY.- Stephen Haller Gallery announces the opening of an exciting exhibition of new paintings LINDA STOJAK: TETHER running from October 18th until November 24th.

The Guggenheim Award-winning painter is known for intensely personal work characterized by a disquieting beauty. Her indelible images deal with feminist issues of power and identity. In this new series, as in her best-known work, Stojak confronts the self, identity, and the female body. Her works have been called “psychological self-portraits.”

Critic Michael Amy has written that Stojak’s paintings give “the illusion of almost intangible flesh, as open as a wound.” He described the “flesh-like surfaces of her pictures” as “rich epidermises filled with the history of their own generation.”

Aside from the underlying narrative impact of the work, Stojak is also focused on quite painterly concerns. Art in America critic Edward Leffingwell has written of Linda Stojak’s paintings that they are “as formally compelling as they are moving.”

Stojak’s work consists mostly of a solitary figure emerging from a contrasting ground, a field of relentless palette-knife-wide strokes of oil paint obsessively worked and reworked until the brushstroke itself becomes the search for meaning. Stojak says of the title, Tether: “as I am/was working I always had in mind that line around the figures that was holding them in place and the idea that if that paper line was pulled, the figures would become undone … untethered.”

Hers is a technique both sensual and gestural – the expressionistic played against the conceptual. Linda Stojak’s work is suffused with a profound humanity. In the words of critic Michael Amy: “her figures offer a remarkable evocation of our very lives.”