Welcome to the Stanczak Color Quarterly. This newsletter celebrates the work of seminal Op-Artist Julian Stanczak, honoring his rigorous investigation—and enduring love—of color. Our inaugural issue invites you to enjoy his 16-panel constellation painting Complementaries = Yellow, 2007. We hope it brightens your day, as well as your inbox. After that, read on for recent and upcoming Stanczak exhibitions and press highlights. Plus, this issue of the Color Quarterly offers a glimpse into the Stanczak Foundation archives.
In creating this painting, Stanczak wanted to use complementary colors to create the illusion of yellows singing with multiple voices. He used relatively few actual yellows. Rather, each panel consists of six colors: three warm and three cool. These sets of warm and cool colors are paired and shift together, getting lighter or darker.
Stanczak used different colors in each panel. Accordingly, each appears to have a slightly different “yellow” glow than the others. The shapes are the same from panel to panel, except that they are mirrored, reflected and turned. By grouping these individual paintings into one visual unit, Stanczak presents 16 vertical and horizontal twists in space that dance together in a symphony of colored yellow light.
The Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition Julian Stanczak: Seriality, featuring Complementaries = Yellow, was an Artnet “Editors’ Pick.” Artnet heralded the serial images for demonstrating “how Stanczak’s entrancing abstractions were grounded in observation of natural phenomena, such as the way light gradates from dawn to dusk or autumn shifts to spring.”
Stanczak's Succession, 1980-2013, emantes light - Barbara Stanczak explains how Julian Stanczak carefully balanced 30 different colors to create the painting’s luminous effect and writes about why this work remains one of her favorites. In the essay, she details two enduring goals of Stanczak’s artistic practice: achieving “color melt-down” and “metamorphosis.”
A new essay explores how Stanczak created the warm, radiant glow of Green Light, 1973. “In Green Light, neither shapes nor colorants fight for individual recognition; rather, they are all subservient to the filtration of warm light. ” —Barbara Stanczak on Green Light, 1973. Click to read the full essay.
Welcome back to the Stanczak Color Quarterly, the newsletter celebrating the work of seminal Op Artist and master colorist Julian Stanczak. Read on to discover more about Chase, 1976–77, and to learn more about recent Stanczak exhibitions and news. Chase shows four curving columns, divided into pairs of two. The pairs appear to be painted using two different sets of colors. However, within every column, Stanczak applied the same colors in the same order—with only one exception. In a new essay, Barbara Stanczak shares the colors used (showing the original color swatch) and details Julian Stanczak's method for effecting the dramatic visual color shifts we see on the canvas.
Welcome back to the Stanczak Color Quarterly, the newsletter celebrating the work of seminal Op Artist and master colorist Julian Stanczak. This issue features a 1998 work, Low Sound. At first glance, Low Sound appears to be painted in black and white. A closer look reveals the painting's predominant color to be purple (or, to be precise, two different purples). “Low Sound looks deceptively simple upon first encounter, but the longer the viewer spends with the painting, the more they experience a number of magical touches. ” —Barbara Stanczak on Low Sound
This newsletter celebrates the work of seminal Op-Artist Julian Stanczak, honoring his rigorous investigation—and enduring love—of color. Our inaugural issue invites you to enjoy his 16-panel constellation painting Complementaries = Yellow, 2007.
