Lewis Stein (1945 â April 22, 2022) was an American visual artist who lived in New York City.
Stein was born in New York City in 1945. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, between 1964 and 1966, and the University of California at Berkeley between 1966 and 1968. He studied architecture at MIT and sculpture at the University of California at Berkeley.
Stein's earliest work consisted of large acrylic or alkyd on gessoed canvas paintings in the minimalist mode which he had described as âÂÂanti-paintings.â As he explained to Mousse Magazine in 2017, âÂÂI was using painting to deconstruct painting. I wasnâÂÂt thinking of making fun of painting, but theyâÂÂre funny paintings.âÂÂ
The artist was represented in the Whitney Annual (precursor to the Whitney Biennial) in 1969 at age 24. His first exhibits, all solo shows, were at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, the David Whitney Gallery in New York and the Gallery in Cologne, Germany between 1969 and 1972. He was introduced to each of these galleries by the noted dealer Richard Bellamy. Bellamy, in turn, had in turn been introduced to Stein by the artist and critic Brian OâÂÂDoherty who had visited the artist at his Oakland studio in 1968.
Stein's output expanded to include object pieces, installations and photographic-based art over the succeeding decades. A retrospective of Stein's works between 1968 and 1971 was held in the fall of 2017 at New York's Essex Street Gallery. ArtforumâÂÂs critic determined that SteinâÂÂs object pieces, âÂÂisolated and stripped of their abilities to punish, regulate or restrict,â offered âÂÂa kind of realism predicated on the physiological response to stimulusâÂÂa rare opportunity to be intimate with a set of specific spatial relationships that govern conduct.âÂÂ. Frieze Magazine's reviewer, Josephine Graf, appraised the show as making âÂÂa compelling argument for revisiting SteinâÂÂs oeuvre. Stein separates the readymade from its Duchampian irony, revealing instead how everyday objects can guide visibility and delimit movement in a subtle and concise form of policing.â Evaluating the same exhibit, Art Review scribe Jeppe Ugelvig opined that âÂÂLewis spatialized and readymades are--like most derivatives of âÂÂhostileâ and âÂÂregulatoryâ architecturesâÂÂseductive in their violence, and their position as deeply antagonistic in particular, to the idealist project of Minimalism and its pursuit of perceptual objectivity.âÂÂ
A thread that ran through much of SteinâÂÂs work was the effect of perceptual structures upon human experiences. Of a 1986 show at Postmasters Gallery featuring a series of household hammers--one of the artistâÂÂs earliest works--alongside photographs of light sources from the '80s, Art in America critic, Paul Smith, observed that both the hammers and the photographic images âÂÂcan be seen as addressing a similar deadened frustration of function and expectation in traditional art.â He noted that Stein's âÂÂother recent photographic series--of surveillance cameras, shadows and chandeliers suggest that he was not so interested in frustration per se as he was in the rich visual possibilities of the readymade world.â In a series of photographs of cows begun in the 1990s, Stein photographs the animals staring directly into the viewer's eyes, prompting him to wonder if he himself is being examined by the cow.
The contrast between expectation and reality is another theme recurring throughout Stein's works. For a 1990 exhibit at the Paula Allen Gallery consisting of photographs of mirrors from the pages of mail order catalogs blown-up to life size, Artforum reviewer John Miller felt a sense of âÂÂa creeping shoddiness overriding the too-familiar elegance this hybridization typically yields and relies upon.â Instead of evoking glamour or polish, the "specific of mail order furnishings does not exactly conjure up visions of luxury,â Miller concluded. Likening a series of Stein's photographs of chandeliers to âÂÂswitched-on May Ray,â the New Yorker declared that âÂÂA single idea--that light is photogenic--goes quite far.â [10] The Village Voice described the same show as âÂÂbig, dumb, black-and-white pictures of electric chandeliers glowing out of pitch black space [that] âÂÂfill the gallery with a cold, postmod light.âÂÂ
Like other artists who were shaped by the ferment of the 1960s. Stein's work also addressed social and political issues of the day. Of his black-and-white photographs of surveillance cameras which appeared in a show at New York's Queen's Museum in 1986, curator Marc H. Miller declared that âÂÂThough 1984 has come and gone, OrwellâÂÂs vision of Big Brother is still a real possibilityâ¦.Stein's photographs are a reminder that TV is not just something we watch, but something that is watching us.â Of the artist's playfully ironic stock photograph of an Oster brand blender perched alongside strawberries and a pink milkshake in a House Beautiful-perfect kitchen, critic Noah Dillon opined: âÂÂWithout an advertiserâÂÂs text, SteinâÂÂs photograph points less to the blender that is its formal centerpiece, and more to the amorphous sense of fulfillment the machine is equipped to provide.âÂÂ
Among his influences, Stein cited Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Ad Reinhardt and Robert Morris.
Stein's work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the United States. It is also held in numerous public and private collections.
Lewis Stein's first posthumous exhibition opened on July 1, 2024 at Maxwell Graham, New York.
Art Review