David Richard Contemporary is pleased to present Elusive Transparencies, a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Julian Stanczak focused exclusively on his illusory “see-through” abstractions, which have been at the core of his art-making practice for the past five decades. The presentation will feature Stanczak’s various methods for producing optical effects on canvas, including his use of color—contrasting, physical mixing or varying proportions of just one color—in combination with other techniques, such overlapping planar shapes or lines in compositions; defining shapes with hard or diffuse edges; adding vertical or horizontal lines to activate the surfaces; and layering dots, dashes and triangles in contrasting colors on the surfaces to produce vibrational effects. Paintings from 1968 to the present, including his most recent one comprised of 15 separate panels—each 16 inches square—will be exhibited.

Julian Stanczak’s impressive career includes over 90 solo exhibitions in New York, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Cincinnati, Houston, Los Angeles, London, England, Tokyo, Japan, Warsaw, Poland and Ontario, Canada, among other cities. His artwork has been featured in numerous national and international group shows such as the seminal exhibitions in 1965 that established the perceptual art movement, Vibrations Eleven, at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York and The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Stanczak’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of 76 museums, among them, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Gallery of Art and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.) and Victoria and Albert Museum (London, England). His artwork is also featured in many important public and private collections. Julian Stanczak was born in Borownica, Poland and now lives and works in Seven Hills, Ohio.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by the artist, Julian Stanczak. The catalogue will also be available on-line.