Julian Stanczak's optical artworks have found a home at Cork Street's The Mayor Gallery over the summer. But what makes the artist's work stand out in a sea of Op art? Above anything, 'Beyond the Mirror' does more than trick the eye; it uncovers a story of hope and a life filled with colour. You know an exhibition is a success when its closing date is extended. Opening to the public at the beginning of summer, The Mayor Gallery's Beyond the Mirror introduced the lively paintings of Op art genius Julian Stanczak to London. Bold, nostalgic, vivid and trance-like are just some of the words that fit the description of a Stansck piece, and yet, once the eye meets the artist's canvases, all possible adjectives seem to fall relatively flat in comparison. Stanczak's artworks are much grander than optical illusions; they are invitations to see into his life and work in full, brewing with references from his youth spent in a Polish refugee camp in Uganda, where he evokes the memory of the country's colourfully magnetic landscape.

Just above East Sixth Street and across from the Contemporary Arts Center, the intersecting chromatic lines of Julian Stanczak’s Additional (2007) are an iconic part of Fountain Square’s public artwork, even if it’s easy to assume the work is just an architect’s creative flair. So what is Additional, and who is the artist behind it? Stanczak was a Polish-born painter and printmaker who was one of the progenitors of Op-Art, a movement of the 1960’s focused on using light and color to create complex visual experiences that engage the eye. Stanczak has a direct connection to Ohio—he worked as painting faculty at both the University of Cincinnati and later the Cleveland Art Institute and lived in the state for 60 years, from 1957 until his death in 2017. The majority of Stanczak’s works were based on painting and printmaking, with this work being the only known sculpture/installation work done by him. His only other public work was done by painting directly onto a brick building and, as a result of issues with contractors, did not last particularly long before changes in weather caused it to dilapidate.

Ten years ago it seemed Cork Street might lose its gallery-driven identity and become just another shopping street. Now it’s on the up, with Goodman Gallery and Frieze moving in recently, and Stephen Friedman and Alison Jacques to follow. Tracking back, The Mayor Gallery was actually the first to open on the street, when founded by Fred Mayor (1903-73) in 1925. This century it has concentrated on the ZERO and Concrete movements and other artists in tune with them: I recall particularly good shows by Raimund Girke, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Peter Dreher and François Morellet, for example. And in these days of death-by-QR-code, it’s good to report that The Mayor Gallery provides substantial well-illustrated catalogue booklets with worthwhile writing on the shows. Up now is Julian Stanczak (1928-2017), a Polish American for whose work the term Op Art was first coined. It’s evident that Stanczak sits alongside Vasarely and Riley in finding contrasting yet related ways to make the viewer’s perceptual experience the primary subject.

Based between Poland and France, Artur Trawinski harbors a strong attachment to Eastern European art, particularly Abstract Expressionism of the 1960s and its Polish practitioners, both emerging and established. With nearly 400 works in his collection, Trawinski currently sits on the International Circle acquisition committee at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. We caught up with him to learn more about his transeuropean collecting journey. "Some of my recent purchases are young artists from Eastern Europe, especially young geometric artists. An artist I recently purchased from Jecza Gallery—a young and dynamic gallery in Romania—is Vladiana Ghiulvessi. She is strongly following in the footsteps of Henryk Stażewski, Victor Vasarely, Julian Stanczak, Imre Bak, and Julije Knifer—artists I’ve been collecting for many years. All the artworks from my collection rotate regularly, but above the sofa is a place for favorites, such as the one I have hanging there right now, which is a Victor Vasarely, and just before that, a work by Julian Stanczak."

Art museums do not collect beautiful things. Perhaps I should rephrase that sentence. Art museums do not collect art for its beauty alone. It takes something extra for a painting to find its way onto the walls of any museum, whether it be the Canton Museum of Art or the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. And, that something extra … art’s vigorish … is what makes art museums one of the greatest ways to spend a leisurely afternoon. Museums make you think. A museum’s vig may be tied to history, innovation, medium or mission. It depends on what it decides to collect. The Canton Museum of Art focuses on American works on paper and ceramics. Its outstanding collection of such art is worth over $35 million. The Toledo Museum, with a far larger endowment, collects the very best works from a select group of A-list artists. The Cleveland Museum of Art, with an even bigger endowment, has assembled one of the world’s widest ranging collections "for the benefit of all the people forever.” They put their money where their mouth is with free attendance for everyone.

Julian Stanczak's exhibition "The Light Inside" at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles featured in Artforum's 'must see' guide. Opening of our fourth solo exhibition of paintings by Polish-American artist Julian Stanczak. The Light Inside explores Stanczak's intuitive use of color and geometric abstraction to create a sense of radiant light.

Julian Stanczak: The Light Inside at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Exploring the artist’s intuitive use of color and geometric abstraction to create a sense of radiant light, this historic series of paintings resonates with the themes of the California Light And Space movement. According to the late artist, his minimal compositions are emotional landscapes that express his desire to transcend the surface containment of the painting as object and connect with the viewer through perception.

You may think that experiences such as forced labor in Siberia, losing the nerves in his dominant arm, or ending up in a refugee camp would have broken him. However, they didn’t; on the contrary, he transformed these extreme and abstract life experiences into a completely innovative painting style: Op Art. Meet Julian Stanczak, an abstract painter who fell into oblivion but will be rediscovered. Even though Julian Stańczak is considered an icon and one of the founding fathers of Op Art, he is known to the very few. Despite the fact that his works have been exhibited for over 60 years and over 70 museums own his pieces, he has never gained vast public recognition. Hence, next time you’re in Cleveland Institute of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Miami University Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, or Museum of Modern Art, pay his art a visit.

In the gallery’s third exhibition on the late Op Art innovator Julian Stanczak, Mitchell-Innes and Nash has honed in on 10 large-scale, multi-panel paintings that capture the artist’s proclivity for working in series. A rare approach among other standard-bearers of the movement, seriality reflects 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. This connection takes the show’s sensual pleasures beyond the realm of good vibes and grounds them in something more knowable, tangible, and memorable.

My last stop was “Julian Stanczak: The Eighties,” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Stanczak, who died in 2017, was an early practitioner of Op Art, a movement that originated in the 1960s, emphasizing the optical effects of an artwork and the mechanics of perception. The 15 works on view all date from the 1980s and reflect Stanczak’s utter dedication to the style. They consist of nothing but stripes and discreet, mostly rectilinear blocks of color, but are so masterfully planned and constructed that they generate luminous fields of light and color that seem to glow and hover off the gallery walls. Rather than attempting to blend various hues together, he carefully orchestrated adjacent but discreet blocks of color to create subtle transitions. His paintings happen, not on the canvas but inside our heads, as our brains turn myriad tiny areas of flat color into luminous clouds of light. In some ways, Stanczak’s painting process was proto-algorithmic, creating an overall effect through the consistent, application of an evolving set of rules. They are masterworks of control that end up being strangely numinous.

Then, compare and contrast Agnes Martin’s use of contrasting color values with the work of the painter Julian Stanczak, known for his Op Art style that also boldly plays with the eye. Op Art is a type of visual art that creates optical illusions.

FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art announces the opening of Press and Professional accreditation and the Triennial's initial group of project highlights, which includes FRONT commissions and exhibitions that will activate unique and unconventional spaces throughout the city of Cleveland. These projects spotlight particular sites, buildings and locations in Cleveland that carry social, cultural or political significance in its history and current reality. In these unique spaces, FRONT artists will unveil a range of projects including site-specific works that engage the city’s rich identity, while allowing a broader contemplation of people and place to both residents and visitors.

The painter Julian Stanczak died earlier this year in his hometown of Cleveland Ohio, at the age of 88. Prior to his death, Mitchell-Innes and Nash in New York had been planning what would have been the second solo exhibition at the gallery of his work. That exhibition opened on 18 May, less than two months after Stanczak passed, and it has became more than just another show. It is a celebration of the work and the life of a truly beloved and influential artist.

I wanted Trespassing Light to appear effortless. I wanted to "hear" the red shout, and I am satisfied with the outcome. 

Living together for almost fifty-five years, Julian and I—and later our children, too—experienced many memorable adventures; we crossed the country by car from one national park to the next, from one unique experience to another. As I took in nature’s formations and found myself enthralled by America’s geology, Julian was registering everything within his mind’s eye.

Mr. Stanczak’s art evinced a tremendous geometric inventiveness. He constantly elaborated on the possibilities of parallel stripes, both straight and undulant; squares, both checkerboard and concentric; and grids, usually amplified by contrasting saturated colors.

Now change has provocatively shaken up the Modern’s relatively undisturbed sanctum sanctorum: the grand permanent collection galleries, on the fourth and fifth floors, which are typically devoted to the Modern’s unparalleled holdings in the painting-and-sculpture department.

The installation of these galleries has long been the closely guarded aegis of one or two top curators in the department. Now the fourth floor — devoted to works from 1940 to 1980 — has been reinstalled by a collective of 15 curators from across the museum. Another departure: MoMA’s movement-by-movement, Eurocentric vision of Modernism has been replaced with a wide-angle focus on a single decade. “From the Collection: 1960-1969,” a yearlong presentation, zeros in on the overfetishized 1960s, when art and politics were in turmoil and interacted with a new force, and tells its story with work by more than 200 artists from around 20 countries.

The leveling determination is more convincing when the curators select as a representative for the unmentioned Op Art movement not Bridget Riley but the overlooked innovator Julian Stanczak and his “This Duel” (1963), his jazzy star turn in undulating black and white lines. Instead of including Frank Stella as the avatar of Minimalist painting, the honor goes to Agnes Martin and Jo Baer.

Since the early years of the 20th century, artists have routinely flaunted the boundary separating art from technology-from the "engineer's esthetic" embraced by Le Corbusier to Andy Warhol's famous blague, "I want to be a machine."