Steven Steinman: New Work
February 1 - March 15, 2025
Opening reception: February 1, 2:00pm to 5:00pm
The Gloaming, 2023, Acrylic on Linen, 45 x 36 inches
We are pleased to announce “Steven Steinman: New Paintings,” a small, focused exhibition of artworks by this veteran Los Angeles artist. “New Paintings” is presented in conjunction with “Karen Carson: Eye Shadow.” Both shows open on Saturday, February 1 with an artists’ reception from 2:00 - 5:00 pm at as-is.la
Although Steven Steinman’s new paintings are correctly identified as what they are—paintings—this artist has long been associated with drawing (broadly defined), with various forms of non-representational mark-making extending right up to the edge of asemic writing. And so while Steinman’s resolutely abstract paintings deploy paint material and color across a stretched fabric ground pretty much as expected, their continued loyalty to the most radical tropes of avant-garde drawing—Rorschach blots and automatic writing, among others—are inescapably obvious.
Steinman was educated in Los Angeles (where exhibition-mate Karen Carson was among his teachers) and is back here again now. But this artist spent crucial years living and working in Europe. And so it is exposure to some manifestations of European postwar art, including Art Informel and Tachisme—movements that were similarly disposed to compulsive mark-making, overall non-composition and aleatory painting effects—that perhaps provides the context for appreciating this new work. Indeed, it may be Steinman’s achievement to have re-visited such now nearly forgotten moments in art history and to have returned with a body of powerful new artworks that make those issues fresh and pertinent again.