Julian Stanczak


 

JULIAN STANCZAK (1928 - 2017) was born in Poland in 1928 and died in Seven Hills, Ohio in March of 2017. He received his M.F.A from Yale University in 1956, where he studied with Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli. His work has been included in exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally from 1948 to the present day.  His early life was marked by enormous personal struggle, and equally by his commitment to an uplifted outlook informed by art and music. Forced into a labor camp in Siberia during World War II, he began his art-making in as a teenage refugee in Uganda where he sought to transmit his experience of the stunning light and landscape of East Africa.  Stanczak arrived in Cleveland, Ohio in 1950, then took his BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art; and his MFA at Yale (1956).  

Stanczak is included in the upcoming FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (July 14 - Sept 30, 2018).  His paintings have exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Important group shows include The Responsive Eye, MOMA (1965); Site and Insight: An Assemblage of Artists (Curated by Agnes Gund), MOMA/P.S. 1 (2003), Ghosts in the Machine, New Museum, (2012), and currently Geometric Obsession: The American School 1965-2015, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Buenos Aires (MACBA), Argentina (2016).  Major solo exhibitions include Julian Stanczak: 50 Year Retrospective, Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio, (2001) and Line Color Illusion: 40 Years of Collecting, Julian Stanczak, Akron Art Museum, Ohio, (2013). His work is included in the permanent collection of more than 80 institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery, Washington, DC; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.