Stephen Westfall, Jig, 2005

Stephen Westfall

Jig, 2005

Woodblock, on Hiromi Iwa Hara-shi Kasa Japanese paper

Signed, dated 2005 and numbered 10/35 in graphite pencil on the front

Frame included

Woodblock on Hiromi Iwa Hara-shi Kasa Japanese paper
Signed and numbered in graphite pencil 10/35 on the front
Published by Durham Press, Durham, Pennsylvania
Elegantly floated and framed in a wood frame under glass
Measurements:
Framed:
20.25 inches vertical by 17.25 horizontal by 1.25 inches depth
Artwork:
19 inches (vertical) x 15.5 inches (horizontal)
Stephen Westfall's Jig explore the interplay between color and structure by abstracting the classic grid format, a practice Westfall has become known for. Westfall relates his interest in the grid to his introduction to artists such as Agnes Martin and Matisse. Through Martin and Mondrian, Westfall discovered the possibilities of building a composition with vertical and horizontal lines, though he quickly found that his work could not be contained in a purely grid-like format. Westfall attributes this to his "mixed dominance" - using different hands for different tasks instead of relying on a single side, thinking and acting with a level of balanced asymmetry. Instead of creating a composition solely through structure, Westfall finds his mode of abstraction in a new way: color. As he sees in Matisses' painting The Red Studio, color can be liberated from shape, a concept furthered by artists such as Rothko who allows color to become the entire figure. Color as form continues to play a large role in Westfall's practice, allowing him to exist in while simultaneously break free from the grid format. Jig, Westfall's first collaboration with Durham Press, features a series of imperfect, disjointed grids. Order and structure become fragmented as the composition is thrown off kilter by lines which do not follow straight across the print. Each vertical and horizontal is interrupted, some distinctly and some subtly, abstracting the classic grid format to make it twist and turn.

Stephen Westfall Biography:
Stephen Westfall’s (American, b. 1953) paintings have charted a course between post-minimalist geometries and a Pop inflected awareness of a painting as a thing in the world. The brightly colored diamonds, triangles and trapezoids in his most recent canvases are conjoined into dynamic compositional skeins that seem to lean into space rather than recede. Drawing on Caucasian and Navajo rugs, medieval heraldry, Byzantine floor tile, early twentieth century abstraction, architecture and Pop, Minimalist and post-Minimalist painting, Westfall’s abstraction is deeply acculturated while formally honed into an active, perceptual immediacy.

Westfall received his MFA in 1978 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His first solo exhibition in 1984 at Tracey Garet in New York’s East Village earned reviews that took note of his particular brand of geometric abstraction. Exhibitions followed during the 1980s and into the 1990s at Daniel Newburg Gallery in New York, Galerie Paal in Munich, Germany and Galerie Wilma Lock in St. Gallen, Switzerland. An exhibition of paintings took place at Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York in 1995, followed by several exhibitions at Galerie Zurcher in Paris. Recent work has been exhibited at Kunstgalerie Bonn in Germany and David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe.

Westfall is a professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He is a contributing editor at Art in America.
-Courtesy Alexandre Gallery