Publications
The Covid Diary is a 12” x 10” monograph containing 127 reproductions of Posen’s works on paper created between 2020 and 2022. The book features essays by Max Lakin, Lee Miller and Madeleine Haddon, as well as an essay by the artist. Produced in conjunction with the September 2022 exhibition at Payne Gallery | Moravian University in Bethlehem PA.
ELLIPSIS: DUAL VISION
Photographs by Stephen Posen
published by Glitterati Incorporated
Exploring photography with a painter’s eye, Stephen Posen has revolved his painting process around the ontology of photography for forty years. In ELLIPSIS: DUAL VISION, his first monograph, the artist comes full circle with a series of 174 paired photographs.
Blurring the lines between realism and abstraction, Posen uses the photograph as a poet uses the word, each image acting as both the symbol and subject of a larger idea. Teasing elusive connections with his provocative pairs, Posen invites us to participate in the expression of his work and offers a new way of seeing the world, without any preconceived context.
The New York TImes: T Magazine review
Wallpaper* magazine review
DOCUMENT slide show
Art : BOMB On The Scene
The Evolution of Stephen Posen
by Richard J. Goldstein
Contrary to the zeitgeist, Posen chose not to abandon the materiality of paint and illusions of space, a decision based upon a commitment to his training as a painter and questions of representation raised by the Vietnam War...read more
DOCUMENT NO. 154–
THE GHOST DANCER
Interview by Tim Goossens, Photography by Andy Ryan
Painter Photographer Stephen Posen's work is an elaborate dance of juxtapositions and the transcendent quality of time. The artist explains his unique stylistic approach in creating his haunting narratives....read more
Dancer/Mirror
Essay by Dore Ashton
Think of Stephen Posen as Theseus paying out his line, traversing his labyrinth knowing and not knowing what awaits him. Perhaps Posen shares Paul Klee's ambition of 1908 "to note experiences which could translate themselves into line even in absolute darkness." The tacit question is: can a line still be fictive - that is to say, imaginative - in a real space? When certain modernists changed the diction of art schools in the twentieth century, substituting something called "two dimensional design" for the serviceable, old-world "drawing," they erred. Drawing has always been multi-dimensional, since what it figures is movement through space, among many other things. It is always a drawing-upon....read more
The Drawing Center, New York, 2006
New York, Pragati, 2006
Delphic Dalliance
Essay by Dore Ashton
Wherever I look in Posen's oeuvre, I see him elaborately maneuvering between bounded and unbounded. The challenge of the eternal rectangle, the sheet of paper, incites him to mutiny...read more
Tutelary Sprits & Spatial Ambiguity
Essay by Raphael Rubinstein
Stephen Posen generally begins each of his recent drawings by making a pencil rule line just within the confines of the rectangular paper. As the drawing evolves...read more
Stephen Posen: New Paintings
Essay by Lauren Sedofsky
When a painter’s assertive force shifts readily from the realm of pure visual experience to direct participation in the major cultural issues of the historical moment, we have a measure of his achievement. The simple trangressiveness of Stephen Posen’s recent paintings goes right to the heart of the matter, for it calls into question the enlightened complacency with which artists and viewers alike have come to accept an environment of appropriative strategies and seemingly endless artistic options....read more
Dialectic in Modernism: The Paintings of Stephen Posen
Art International, vol. 8, December 1979
Alwynne Mackie
Modernism must surely be the most important development in modern art. It must also be the least understood and most abused one, the most common way of apprehending it (especially among critics and art historians) being one which crudely polarizes into abuse or adulation, with each side denying or claiming the seriousness and importance of the art the movement produces. Severe cases of anti-modernism quite often express themselves in what is really a quite different and separate (and to my mind, untenable) distinction, that of form versus...read more
Stephen Posen and the Mixed Metaphor
Arts, October 1978
Dore Ashton
Stephen Posen is using two different modes within a single image. In the one, he painstakingly offers a painted simulacrum of a photograph. In the other, he is using oil paint to offer spatial illusions that border on trompe l’oeil.
Stephen Posen’s paintings are like recondite riddles: there is always something of an answer hidden within the works themselves. Their pronounced character derives from the fact that Posen is an adept of the mixed metaphor. One has to speak metaphorically even here.....read more
“Posen’s Two Paintings a Year Are Well Worth Waiting For”
The New York Times, Sunday, September 21, 1975
By John Canaday
For anyone interested in the current realistic redirection of American Art, the prospect of seeing two new paintings by Stephen Posen in a forthcoming group show at the O.K. Harris Gallery in SoHo should be assurance that the movement is still valid in spite of the abuses to which it has been subjected....read more
The Structuralists: Stephen Posen and Zac Posen
Whitewall, Fall 2008
Zac Posen, fashion designer, experienced the unique advantage of growing up watching his father, artist Stephen Posen, construct massive still lifes that mixed cloth, photo images, and paint. The question remains, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"....read more
FLATT: Issue #6
The Posens: A Family Affair
FLATT Editor at Large, Nico Iliev had the chance to sit with one of Manhattan's most charming and visionary families, the Posens. Stephen and Susan parents to Alexandra and Zac, collective share thoughts about their creative beginnings, artistic process and the power of raising a family with love and awareness....read more
Stephen Posen Knows How to Fashion a Line. So Does His Son, Zac Posen.
The New York Times, Tuesday, May 1, 2018
By Ted Loos
For the artist Stephen Posen, the 1960s were promising indeed. He was a kid from St. Louis who went to Yale and impressed people with his painting ability, coming of age alongside schoolmates who were future art stars: Richard Serra, Chuck Close, and Brice Marden .…read more
Stephen Posen’s Radical Return
Cultured Magazine, Thursday, June 14, 2018
By Charlotte Burns
Most people’s storage units contain dusty furniture or outdated clothing with outgrown waistlines. But when artist Stephen Posen rummaged through his storage space, he uncovered a trove of his radical early canvases buried deep within. The works are now on view at Vito Schnabel Projects in New York and will be on view at his St. Moritz gallery….read more
Vito Schnabel Projects, 2018
Stephen Posen: Paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s
Essay by Alex Bacon
In the mid-twentieth century the photograph was a physical entity. Starting life in the camera as an impression on a strip of film, the photograph became formalized in the darkroom as a print on paper, executed at a certain size, through the application of particular techniques….read more
Zac Posen Shares How His Father’s Art Inspired His Career
Galerie Magazine, Wednesday, September 11, 2019
My father made this work early in his career. Growing up, I wasn’t even aware of these paintings, but the fabric and materials he used to build the models were incorporated into my play things as a kid. Then, when I first started making clothing, it was out of the same remnants….read more