NEWS
- 500 Terry Francios, San Francisco – 2023 Solo Exhibition
- Desta Gallery, Mill Valley – 2021 Solo Exhibition
- Gilman Contemporary, Sun Valley – 2017 Solo Exhibition
- Kelsey Michaels Fine Art Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA – 2017 Solo Exhibition
- Toomey-Tourell Gallery, San Francisco – 2013 Solo Exhibition
- Artist Interview with Michael Corbin
- geoform.net: online curatorial project
ESSAYS & REVIEWS
Paul Baker Pringle, Museum Director, Kleefeld Museum of Contemporary Art, Long Beach
“Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum is fortunate to add two mixed-media works to its collection by Berkeley, California based artist Stephanie Weber. Weber first exhibited at the Museum in 1985 as part of the now-decades-long exhibition series Centric. This series, which is oriented toward introducing artists from outside LA to the Museum’s audiences as well as sharing lesser-known bodies of work from familiar artists, returns to the Museum’s galleries this coming academic year occasioned by the complete renovation and expansion of the Museum. Weber’s Allegra (1984) and Stratum Series N (2019) are representative of the artist’s sixty-year career which began as a student at UCLA from which she received a BFA. At UCLA, Weber studied with Elmer Bischoff, John Paul Jones, Nathan Oliveira, and Richard Deibenkorn. Weber has been honored with exhibitions at The Oakland Museum, Skirball Museum (Los Angeles), Amarillo Museum of Art, and University Art Museum, ASU (Tempe). A former resident at the American Academy in Rome and The Tamarind Institute, Weber’s works have been collected by the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.), Orange County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Crocker Museum (Sacramento), and the New York Public Library.
Over the course of her career, Stephanie Weber has explored the relationship between emotion and logic. The luminous strata of her horizontally layered compositions are in part inspired by the tensions between her love of the natural world and her immediate surroundings at the urban fringe in the Berkeley hills. In this way, Weber‘s mixed media works and also paintings on aluminum lean in to the ineffable as they evoke rather than specify her experience of the orderly built environment where it meets the freedom of nature. The mark of the Bay Area’s remarkable natural environment extends further within her practice to the exploration of light and color unique to coastal northern California. Well suited to hang alongside other works from the Museum’s important collection of post-war and contemporary abstract paintings and works on paper, Allegra and Stratum Series N will dialogue particularly well with the Museum’s Hampton Collection—highly regarded for its emphasis on color and gesture—while also fitting alongside the Museum’s expansive collection of works on paper.
Weber believes in engagement with the viewer. She, like a number of artists in the collection, looks to invite viewers into a space where “unexpected associations and resonance might happen,” thusly revealing a deep understanding of the role viewers play in making art come alive. For the University’s students, Weber’s sustained practice and the addition of these works to the collection following her solo exhibition nearly forty years ago, is a powerful example of how to build a practice of disciplined and sustained research into motivating questions. Weber’s studio purpose—to make ideas visual and physical and then connect on a physical, intellectual, and emotional level with viewers—is complementary to the Museum’s mission to be a community of people who examine, critique, and create contemporary art and culture. The Museum’s collection committee is honored to partner with Stephanie Weber in inviting our community to engage with this important artist’s work.”
Scott Shields, Chief Curator, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento
“Stephanie Weber’s paintings pulsate. Colors reverberate against one another yet coalesce in a brilliant chromatic whole. Composed of horizontal or vertical stripes and broader fields of color, the apparent simplicity of Weber’s current work is deceptive. Her surfaces are worked intensely and are rich in variety. Soft-edged fields of color float atmospherically. Medium-width bands appear abraded, and narrow stripes waver only slightly to avoid the appearance of rigidity. The quietly reflective surfaces of the honeycomb-aluminum panels that the artist uses as a support add luster to this paint layer. These richly pigmented panels of dazzling color converse with themselves and with the viewers who contemplate them.”
Suzaan Boettger, Art Critic and Historian, New York
“Weber intensifies the presence of structure by painting on sheets of aluminum, their open edges revealing a honeycomb network sandwiched between sheets. This support’s metal grid signals industrial fabrication, another contrast to the fluid color, and which heightens the sense of a juxtaposition of a classicizing ‘yang’ and painterly ‘yin…’ [Weber’s] art displays the benefits of years of discriminating making and looking, of being embedded in both history and contemporary culture, yet maintaining her own engagement with a particular luscious order of beauty.”
Carole Naggar, Art Critic, New York
“If they were music, her images would be scores; if texture, they would be fine faded rugs or antique weavings; and if films, they would be scissored strips laid out in rows in the editing room… Surface treatment and media vary from one zone to the next: some areas are rich and painterly, leaving brush strokes apparent and recalling Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park Series’ or Oliveira’s ‘Steles.’ Others superpose a thin wash of oil over acrylic, while some are flat, crisp and razor-edged… Yet what could be a disparate patchwork possesses depth and unity… These discordant areas could be termed sensuality and logic, or inside and outside. But like the alchemist or romantic poet, Weber knows how to make ideas physical.”
Diana Daniels, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Crocker Museum, Sacramento
“Influenced by Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, and Nathan Oliveria with whom she studied, Stephanie Weber early on internalized a profound intellectual interest and sensitivity to the shimmering ability of light to softly smooth edges, or contrastingly, in its intensity, cast the three-dimensional world into high relief.
Over the course of her career she has concentrated on the logic and aura of these effects, abstracting and reducing shape into bands of color, and in the last decade, manipulating the subtle sheen imparted her hand-mixed hues on aluminum panel supports. In recent works, she explores new iterations of vertical or horizontal bands, adding texture, text, and line; blending or contrasting colors; absorbing herself in the scintillating pull of light.
Newly introduced into these examples are digital elements—details, often of drapery or crushed paper. These are photographs printed onto aluminum strips that become “collaged” into Weber’s compositions. One element among several, the digital imagery offers an unexpected swatch of lustrous, satiny fabric, or highlighted ridges of paper. Isolated and magnified as it is, the strip fools the eye with what appears to be a bit of masterly painting. Wholly intentional is the effect of doing so as Weber paints atop the image, or blends the imagery with thin oil glazes that enmesh the strip seamlessly into the composition. No dialogue is more current in the early–21st century than how new media and digital forms are transforming how we see and relate to art, new and old, a theoretical problem with which Weber artfully plays.
Weber’s twist surprisingly casts painting’s traditions into new light, too. The abstract thinking of the specialist drapery painters from bygone eras illustrates just how mentally satisfying—apart from providing a livelihood—it could be to render the effects of light on fabric alone. With the hint of drapery in digital form enfolded into her compositions there comes a greater sense of visual movement, just as expertly realized drapery added drama to portraiture. Such elements in her panels allow Weber to salute the profoundly creative drives that continue to enrich the ever-evolving history of abstract painting. A philosophical rigor is transmitted through her work as is the personal integrity of her devotion to understanding ideas through painting.”