Maxwell Stevens

Maxwell Stevens attended The Atlanta College of Art where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1993, and the Graduate School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1995.  Shortly after moving to New York City, after many years of working exclusively in non-representational abstraction, Stevens embarked on a significant stylistic shift in his approach to his art.  He began composing his canvases with recognizable imagery, incorporating photorealist figures and lifelike scenes into his works, and then abruptly superposing these paintings directly with tumultuous abstractions. Writing for Meer Magazine, Art Critic Alejandro Pardo described the paintings this way, “The surface you see becomes both the frontier that separates, and the gate that opens and integrates the outer and inner spaces.”

The possibilities with his newly invented approach has allowed him to introduce a wide variety of content and narrative situations into what at first glance often appears as a purely abstract picture, opening up to new subject matter while raising important questions about the very nature of representation, perception, and pattern recognition, constantly questioning and pushing the limits of painting as a form.  Often working with everyday scenes drawn directly from life, the artist has said “I’m interested in the domestic arena as the primary site for our psychological and emotional experiences, and in how we exist differently, historically, within each passing moment. I try to use abstraction and the fragmentation of representational imagery to evoke this.”

Maxwell Stevens has exhibited extensively and internationally in contemporary venues from Tokyo to Dallas to New York, alongside major artists such as Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys, and Dorothea Rockburne.  His paintings and projects have been featured in numerous publications including Art in America, NY Arts Magazine, Meer Magazine, The Museum of Modern Art Contemporary Drawing and Print Associates Bulletin, Fine Art Connoisseur, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Art Papers, among many others. The artist lives and works in New York City.