NEW YORK, NY.- Hionas Gallery is presenting Stephen Maine: New Paintings, a solo exhibition comprising seven vivid works on canvas the artist fabricated through his signature relief print-like process. Adopting an approach to color that Maine describes as “more aggressive … [and] more committed” than his earlier work, he also continues to experiment with his medium’s technical conventions.

Maine’s abstract compositions result from a concrete process; the artist constructs his paintings in concentrated and incremental layers, building activated contrasts of positive and negative space while yielding some degree of control to acrylic paint’s material properties. Each canvas is produced using a single relief “plate”—made from materials such as plywood, extruded foam, modeling paste, joint compound, and glue—allowing the entire procedure to be streamlined. "Pictorial composition," Maine says, "is embedded in the plate—it's a box that's checked before the actual painting process begins. I can concentrate on color, surface, and scale without the distraction of having to organize that information in two dimensions."

Stephen Maine is a painter, art critic, curator, and educator. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Yale University Art Galleries. He has received professional support from Yaddo and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he teaches at SUNY Purchase. This is the artist’s second exhibition with Hionas Gallery. He lives and works in Brooklyn.