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28. Con Ed Smokestack, 1978, color lithograph on paper, signed lower right, edition “50/55” inscribed lower left, 31 x 20 inches (image), 35 x 23 inches (sheet); exhibited: An Exhibition of Recent Paintings by Marina Stern, Forum Gallery, New York, NY, October 6 to 26, 1979 (used as key art for exhibition advertising)
$1,250
Marina Stern was a multifaceted New York-based artist whose works ranged from Expressionism and Pop Art to the Neo Immaculate paintings and pastels for which she is best known. A native of Venice, Stern and her family fled in 1939 to escape Italy’s repressive racial laws. After living in England for several years, the family arrived in the United States in 1941. A bright and capable student, Stern graduated from New York’s Julia Richman High School at age 15 and soon enrolled in the Pratt Institute to pursue an interdisciplinary education in the arts. Despite majoring in advertising design, Stern favored her fine art courses. She graduated from Pratt in 1946 at age 18 and began working for advertising agencies.
After a brief marriage which ended in divorce, Stern married her second husband, who encouraged the artist to study at the Art Students League of New York, under the renowned Japanese American modernist, Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In Fall 1953, Stern gave birth to her first child, Michael, as she continued to study at the Arts Students League. Later in the Spring of 1957, Stern gave birth to her daughter Nina, as she continued to balance motherhood with her fine art practice and commercial art and design work.
Stern’s first significant exhibitions were in 1962 at the Waverly Gallery and the Osgood Gallery, both in New York, followed by inclusion of her work in the Bertha Schaefer Traveling Collage Show from 1963 to 1964. Stern made a splash in the avant-garde art world in 1964 when Time magazine reviewed a show at Amel Gallery which featured three of her audio-visual paintings. Time’s critic noted that Stern created the “cleverest noisemakers” in the exhibition. Time dubbed this work “Talkie Pop,” a label which Stern rejected. Following this recognition, Stern was selected for inclusion in The New American Realism at the Worcester Art Museum—a major showcase of leading artists, including Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns.
After the Worcester exhibition, Stern began to shift away from her “talking” Pop paintings to mysterious, interior scenes with orange, blue or black walls with windows or doors rising above black and white floors, often depopulated, but sometimes with figures. One of these works, Seven Minus Twenty-One Equals Seven, entered the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1966. By 1969, Stern began to incorporate industrial images into these scenes, and in the early 1970s, Stern created her first Neo-Immaculate works of rural, and urban landscapes, which she described as her most satisfying work. Stern often depicted locations that she held close -- New York, New Jersey, Iowa (where her son attended college), Sharon, Connecticut (where her family spent weekends and vacations) and her native Venice, Italy.
Stern’s success as a Neo Immaculate painter led to consistent New York gallery representation for over two decades, first with Lee Ault & Co and James Yu Gallery, and then Forum Gallery, where she had six solo shows. In 1971, Stern completed a Neo-Immaculate mural commission for the Port Authority of New York, George Washington Bridge #1 and #2, followed by another commission from the NY Cityarts Public Art Program in 1976 for a mural on Mulberry Street. Stern also enjoyed solo exhibitions in Boston (Eleanor Rigelhaupt Gallery), Connecticut (Silo Gallery, the Hotchkiss School, J. Rosenthal Fine Arts Gallery, Tremaine Gallery, and Staib Gallery), Chicago (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery), and Santa Fe (Santa Fe East Gallery). Her work was included in group shows at over a dozen public institutions, including The National Academy of Design, The Staten Island Museum, Worcester Art Museum, the Oklahoma Art Center, and the Arkansas Art Center. The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art hosted a retrospective of four decades of Stern’s work from January 19 to April 22, 2007, entitled Perception and the Cultural Environment: The Paintings of Marina Stern. Stern is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, and the O’Brien Art Foundation (Pittsburgh, PA), in addition to other institutions.
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