Bel Ami and CW American Modernism present a retrospective of works by New York-based artist Marina Stern (b. 1928 – d. 2017). The first solo exhibition since her passing, this show offers a window into the practice of an artist who responded to her times in different modes but always with her own insight. With a deft, nearly imperceptible brush stroke, Stern painted constructed spaces that seem both real and imagined, prompting open-ended reflection on perceptions of the modern world. In a successful career spanning fifty years, Stern contributed to Pop and Op Art movements and later to a revival of a strain of American Neo Immaculate architectural and still life painting. Although her subject matter varied as she painted through the decades of a colorful century, Stern infused all her compositions with a unique drama by training her attention on light. 

In this two-part exhibition, Bel Ami displays a selection of 1960s whimsically surreal paintings, as well her later still lifes. CW American Modernism shows Stern’s cityscapes, industrial sites and barns; her pristine renderings of light falling upon urban and rural America are clearly grounded in observation, and yet they also read as pictures in the mind’s eye. 

A native of Venice, Italy, Stern and her family fled in 1939 to escape Italy’s repressive racial laws against Jews. After living in England for several years, the family arrived in the United States in 1941. In New York, Stern studied advertising design at Pratt. After graduating at 18, she pursued a career in commercial illustration while at the same time continuing to paint. In the 1960s she began exhibiting in East Coast galleries and institutions. An avid observer with a playful wit, Stern took advantage of her exposure to European and American art to cultivate her own slant on trends and tropes. 

Stern’s early works, often with warping checkerboard patterns, played on old and new perspectives by appropriating figures from Renaissance paintings and positioning them inside surreal dreamscapes. The hexagonal painting Nocturne (1966) features an illuminated portal at the center, with court musicians mocking the drama of the composition. Renaissance (1969) employs a motif of windows framing windows, referencing Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square; the symmetry of the pattern is disrupted by repeated portraits of a lady by Sandro Botticelli. Bull and Bear (1967) coyly stages symbolic figures from the stock market in a geometric space that seems outside of any real place or time. According to the Boston Globe, “she seems to be having fun. And you will too.”

Other works from this period incorporated sound. For example, in Hay Day, exhibited at New York’s Amel Gallery (1964), Stern depicted a small copy of Francisco de Goya’s La maja desnuda lounging along a high horizon line with a drawstring projecting through the canvas. When pulled, the work’s voice mechanism scavenged from one of her daughter’s dolls asked, “Will you play with me?” Time magazine called her audio-visual pieces the “cleverest noisemakers” in the show. Her compositions with wry commentary earned her acclaim, and a place in the exhibition of The New American Realism (1965) at the Worcester Art Museum alongside leading contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Robert Raushenberg, and Jasper Johns. 

In the next two decades Stern created large harmonious paintings of carefully composed flowers, fruit and vegetables, often set against the backdrop of her New York studio. Though these works contrasted with the more graphic works from the earlier period, they reveal a through-line in her artistic practice: an inspiration to turn the canvas into a mysterious portal. These hyperreal still lifes, on view at Bel Ami, are bathed in perfectly balanced light; the objects seem to occupy a metaphysical space. Interior with Cabbage (1979) features a self-referential painting within a painting, created for Stern’s cookbook, A Book of Vegetables: Recipes and Drawings. Also on display at Bel Ami are: Still Life with Lily, Red Tulips and Red Pears, all painted in 1987. By the 1990s and early 2000s, Stern’s still life compositions became more stark and almost exclusively focused on subjects that showcased the interplay of light and shadow. The culmination of this concern was a series of over fifty paintings of paper bags, folded, crunched, twisted and otherwise manipulated under a harsh light. Two of the most significant remaining uncollected paintings from this series are featured in this exhibition.

Concurrent with the still lifes, Stern began to paint industrial scenes and landscapes. These New York cityscapes, granaries, barns and bridges are on display at CW American Modernism. As before, this series explores how light falls, lending a stark drama to iconically American scenes. However, some of her most compelling cityscapes were inspired by her time in Italy, where she captured the unique glow of Venetian light in her depictions of the famous and quotidian. Street Lamp (1988) features a distant view of the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute interrupted by a modern junction box and projecting electric light and Malamocco (1989) centers the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria Assunta as seen from the village square. These paintings are precise but not realist: the stripped down visions are free from dirt, grime and other messy details, and yet suffused with light. Stern, with virtuoso skill, was not seeking memetic verisimilitude. Rather, she created a beautifully designed alternate reality by editing and essentializing the building blocks of the world around her.

Refusing to conform to just one style and subject, Marina Stern followed her own vision, transforming her study of modernity into compositions that juxtaposed observed details with imagined realities. During her lifetime, Stern saw her work resonate with a wide audience. Her exhibitions at galleries and institutions were reviewed in major publications, and reproductions of her iconic images appeared in mainstream magazines. Her paintings were acquired by museums as well as by illustrious private collectors including Harry Belafonte and Jackie Kennedy. Today her work is represented in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and the Gibbes Museum of Art. This exhibition is made possible with thanks to CW American Modernism, and is part of an ongoing project to honor successful women artists often left behind in the documentation and historicization of art. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay on Marina Stern’s life and work by Chris Walther, available at the gallery.