Lisa Stefanelli

Lisa Stefanelli (American, born 1966) is a painter known for her work in hardline, linear abstraction. Her “Melee” series (1998-2015) is associated with her formative years as a competitive figure skater. Made of automotive paint on panel and using a multitude of visual references, the paintings represent a conversation around the artist’s view of our relationships. They display both grace and complexity in their entanglements, trajectories, and occasional estrangements, and attempt to resolve the struggle that they depict and embody. In the 2010s, Stefanelli began a digital practice centered around concepts from the natural world. This work suggests that all human actions have natural origins.

“The underlying pursuit of my studio practice is to examine the possibility of being simultaneously involved and uninvolved in the complexity of all of our relationships, both animate and inanimate. Elements of the environments we inhabit—signage, sound/music, advertising, and popular culture (basically the cultural clutter of our lives)—are primary in informing the paths and trajectories of the works’ visual language. The work is elaborate and complicated while concurrently yearning to avoid the entanglements it embodies. And yet there is a joy in the confusion we live in. My practice chases that joy.”

-Lisa Stefanelli (2019)

Most recent solo exhibitions include Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado, Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, Penn, Pierogi Gallery, NYC, Robischon Gallery, and Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, California. She has work in the collections of the United States Department of State, Washington DC, The West Collection, Oaks, PA, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA, The Mondstudio Collection at the Kunstmuseum, Berne, Switzerland, The Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY and The Wynn Collection, Las Vegas, NV. Lisa Stefanelli is an artist living and working in New York City and Easton, Pennsylvania. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design and received her degree in 1989. She has been a practicing artist for the last three decades.