Stephen Maine (born 1958) is an American painter, critic and curator.Brody, David. "The Great Pleasure of Surprise: Stephen Maine's Residue Paintings," Artcritical, January 7, 2019. Retrieved March 20, 2025.ARTnews. Stephen Maine, Author. Retrieved March 19, 2025.Genocchio, Benjamin. "Beyond Airbrushing," The New York Times, April 1, 2007. Retrieved March 20, 2025. As an artist, he is known for abstract paintings that he produces by low-tech, mechanical means, applying paint to canvas and paper with intermediary surfaces used like printing plates (e.g., the "Residue paintings" series).Selvin, Claire. "Stephen Maine to Cut Up and Give Away Hunks of Monumental Painting in Connecticut Show," ARTnews, November 2, 2018. Retrieved March 19, 2025.McGlynn, Tom. "Stephen Maine: New Paintings," The Brooklyn Rail, October 2015. Retrieved March 20, 2025.Mendelsohn, John. "Stephen Maine: Typologies," Dart International Magazine, April 28, 2022. Retrieved March 20, 2025. The paintings are notable for their conceptual implications with regard to core art tenets such as personal expression, intention and representation, with critics highlighting their reference to—and simultaneous divergence from—art-historical works and movements that employed impersonal methods of art making.Corwin, William. "Surface Tension: William Corwin on Amalia Piccinini and Stephen Maine," Artcritical, July 14, 2014. Retrieved March 20, 2025.Neal, Patrick. "Stephen Maine's hands-off abstraction," Two Coats of Paint, February 13, 2023. Retrieved March 20, 2025. Brooklyn Rail critic Tom McGlynn wrote, "Maine makes a restrained but compelling case for gestural abstraction's residual ability to touch a nerve," with "non-decisional" works grounded in "a playful suspension of the often-fraught debate between the dogmatically formal and the informality of associative illusion."
Maine's art belongs to the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Untitled, Stephen Maine, Collection. Retrieved March 19, 2025. The Phillips Collection,The Phillips Collection. Stephen Maine, Collection. Retrieved March 19, 2025. Cleveland Museum of Art,Cleveland Museum of Art. "American Abstract Artists 75th Anniversary Print Portfolio," Collection. Retrieved March 19, 2025. and U.S. Department of State,U.S. Department of State. Stephen Maine, Art in Embassies, Artists. Retrieved March 19, 2025. among others. He has exhibited at The Drawing Center,The Drawing Center. "Selections 33," Exhibitions. Retrieved March 19, 2025. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,Green, Nancy E. Splendor of Dynamic Structure: Celebrating 75 Years of the American Abstract Artists, Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2011. Kentler International Drawing Space,Kentler International Drawing Space Stephen Maine Artists. Retrieved March 19, 2025. Deutscher Künstlerbund ProjektraumDeutscher Künstlerbund Projektraum. American Abstract Artists, 2011. Retrieved March 19, 2025. and Riverside Art Museum, among other venues.Riverside Art Museum. "Painting's Edge," Exhibitions, 2008. Retrieved March 19, 2025. His writing has appeared in art publications including Artcritical, Art in America, ARTnews, Hyperallergic and The New York Sun.Artcritical. Stephen Maine, Author. Retrieved March 19, 2025.Hyperallergic. Stephen Maine, Author. Retrieved March 19, 2025.The New York Sun. Stephen Maine, Author. Retrieved March 19, 2025. Maine lives and works in northwest Connecticut and New York City and is married to artist Gelah Penn.Wayne, Leslie. "Heating Up in Falls Village, CT: The Furnace/Art on Paper Archive," Artcritical, June 26, 2021. Retrieved March 20, 2025.
Life and career Maine was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1958.Wilkin, Karen. The Onward of Art, New York: American Abstract Artists, 2016. He studied art at the University of Connecticut and Yale Summer School of Music and Art before graduating with a BFA in painting from Indiana University Bloomington in 1982.New York Foundation for the Arts. Buying Time: Nourishing Excellence, New York: New York Foundation for the Arts, 2001. Retrieved March 20, 2025. In 2014, he completed an MFA in visual art at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Maine has exhibited in solo shows at the 490 Atlantic, National Arts Club, Hionas Gallery, Silas von Morisse Gallery and Private Public Gallery in New York,Panero, James. "Gallery Chronicle: Stephen Maine at Hionas Gallery," The New Criterion, October 2015. Retrieved March 20, 2025. Pazo Fine Art in Washington DC, and Five Points Gallery and Icehouse Project Space in Connecticut, among others.Panero, James. "Critic's Notebook: Stephen Maine, 'Press Play at ODETTA," The New Criterion, July 8, 2019. Retrieved March 20, 2025. He has appeared in surveys including: "Splendor of Dynamic Structure" (Johnson Museum of Art, 2011); "Textility" (Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2012);Two Coats of Paint. "Textility: Idiosyncratic materiality at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey," January 2, 2012. Retrieved March 19, 2025. "Dynamic Invention: American Abstract Artists at 75" (Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, 2013);Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture. American Abstract Artists 75th Anniversary Print Portfolio Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee, 2013. and "The Onward of Art" (2016).
Maine has contributed critical articles and reviews to art publications since 2003. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 2006 to 2016, SUNY Purchase from 2017 to 2024, and for shorter periods at Parsons/The New School and Hartford Art School.
Work and reception Maine's artworks are abstract, featuring edge-to-edge fields of irregular forms and optical effects deriving from color and layering.Butler, Sharon. "Images: Stephen Maine," Two Coats of Paint, January 21, 2011. Retrieved March 20, 2025.Birmingham, Mary. "In the Eye of the Beholder," in Doppler Shift, Summit, NJ: Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2014. They result from an unconventional painting technique that figures prominently in the artist's work and its critical reception. Whereas paint is typically applied by hand using a brush or palette knife, Maine applies it with makeshift stamps created by him from a variety of materials that have included carpeting, mesh, rope and distressed polystyrene foam.Martinović, Jelena. "Blast from the Past – Art of the Noughties For Your Walls," Widewalls, September 26, 2018. Retrieved March 20, 2025.Panero, James. "Critic's Notebook: Art," The New Criterion, April 28, 2014. Retrieved March 20, 2025.Corio, Paul. "Seen in New York, September 2015," Painters' Table, September 2015. Retrieved March 20, 2025. The process produces crude reproductions subject to incidental effects and is akin to relief printmaking. Commentators have asserted that by eliminating hand-controlled gesture from the painting process, Maine effectively subordinates personal expression to elements that are non-decisional, non-expressive and arbitrary.Bashara, Hakim. "8 Art Shows to See in New York This March: Stephen Maine," Hyperallergic, March 1, 2024. Retrieved March 20, 2025. He retains formal elements of artistic control, however, such as color palette and saturation, paint viscosity, and the pressure and repetition of paint impressions.
The process and resulting artwork raise philosophical questions about intentionality, representation, order and entropy, particularly where they intersect with recent art-historical figures and movements. With regard to intentionality, critics liken his approach to the impersonal, "hands-off" methods used in Gerhard Richter's abstractions, minimalism, and the industrial paintings of Andy Warhol. In visual terms, however, Maine's work is more aligned with the abstract, all-over style of Jackson Pollock, whose expressionism contrasts sharply with impersonality. Similarly, some of Maine's work recalls the dot matrices of pop art but are entirely devoid of the representational subjects that are a defining quality of those works. Critics have noted that the juxtaposition of divergent art references is a hallmark of Maine's oeuvre.
Maine's process-driven works also bring into play contrasting ideas about originality, facsimile and seriality. In part, this is due to his use of a repeated, mechanical operation to produce unique canvasses, which inverts the conventional relationship of printmaking to painting. Typically, works created by printmaking and mechanical processes are mass produced and considered inferior to paintings, which are generally unique and "handmade."Cohen, David. Labor Day Shout Outs: Stephen Maine at Hionas Gallery," Artcritical, September 7, 2015. Retrieved March 20, 2025. Critics note that Maine's use of the same printing plate on multiple paintings within a series adds an additional layer of complexity by blurring distinctions between unique, serial and reproduced works. This observation can be made when his paintings are hung side by side, revealing common surface motifs across outwardly dissimilar, divergently colored works.
Painting and other series (late 1990s–2014) Maine mixed unconventional methods, humor and the influences of synthetic Cubism and Op art in early series that explored pattern, perception and the interplay of pictorial and sculptural space.Mattera, Joanne. "Material Means: Diverse Practices, Common Threads," in Textility, Mary Birmingham and Joanne Mattera, Summit, NJ: Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2012. The "Snapline" drawings (late 1990s) and Pitched Planes works (2001–9) were created with textured industrial materials rolled with paint; in the latter series, each shape was made from a different surface, placing emphasis on the legibility of distinct patterns, the optical blending of hues and the illusion of depth. Works such as Mesh painting #11–011 (2011) approached assemblage art, employing patterned fabrics pinned to walls in overlapping, grid-like arrangements instead of stretchers and paint.
In the "Smoke Pictures" and "Halftone Paintings" (2009-14), Maine reconsidered tropes involving painting, mechanical reproduction and the printed image explored by pop art. The paintings consisted of layered fields of crude, abstract dot matrices of various hues and tints that Maine created by stamping paint onto canvas with materials such as carpeting. The resulting images mimicked the look of imperfectly printed halftone photographs, but centered on plays between figure and ground, surface and depth, and allusion rather than overt subject matter (e.g., P13-0909, 2013). Critic David Brody described them as "evoking Roy Lichtenstein's and Sigmar Polke's antipodal versions of Pop while dissolving those associations in an acid bath … of non-composition."
According to William Corwin, key nuances of those series derived from Maine's simulation of halftone imagery, which evoked in viewers a sense of familiarity, as well as concepts of the facsimile and veracity to a point of reference. These notions were confounded by Maine’s process—which was enigmatic and not reproducible—and the images themselves, whose cloud-like or cartographic patterns, Corwin wrote, "insist on some unknown algorithm of order" implicit in the idea of mechanical reproduction yet "seem like casual studies of entropy."
"Residue Paintings" (2014–present)