Stanley Boxer: A Centennial Exhibition

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is pleased to present Stanley Boxer: A Centennial Exhibition, a show that explores the rich and continually evolving practice of 20^th century American abstract painter Stanley Boxer on the occasion of his 100^th birthday.   The installation includes a collection of iconic paintings created across four decades, celebrating Boxer’s relentless experimentation with surface, gesture, and material throughout his more than forty-year career.  The exhibition will run from June 17 – August 14, 2026 and there will be an opening reception on Wednesday, June 17^th from 6-8 pm.  The public is invited and artist Joyce Weinstein, Boxer’s wife, shall be in attendance. 

Stanley Boxer (1926–2000) transformed pigment and surface into a language of pure abstraction.   Often described by critics as a “sculptor of paint,” Stanley Boxer cultivated a materially rich style in which paint was layered and reworked until the canvas carried its own sense of movement.   His paintings possess an improvisatory energy rooted in Abstract Expressionism while remaining distinctly his own.  Across painting, sculpture, collage, and printmaking, Boxer maintained a lifelong commitment to creating works that feel tactile and emotionally charged. As critic Karen Wilkin observed, Boxer’s paintings are “at once lyrical and brutal, aggressively physical and ineffably elusive.”

This exhibition introduces three paintings new to the gallery from Boxer’s Ribbon Paintings (1971-76).  Developed following a period of illness and confinement in late 1970, the Ribbon Paintings reveal an introspective sensibility in Boxer’s work. The works are characterized by rhythmic, ribbon-like gestures that sweep across the canvas, creating a sense of suspended movement.

In the 1980’s, Boxer demonstrated an ability to heavily manipulate surfaces through paint.   Hotjoustatdusk (1985) is a brilliant embodiment of the sensual, three-dimensional quality of his paintings through dense impasto and textured brushwork techniques.  Built from a unified palette, the painting is animated through the rich presence of paint itself.

Tracing the evolution of his body of work, the late-period paintings from the 1990’s onward are often characterized by Boxer’s incorporating unconventional materials that heightened the tactile quality of his work.  Pebbles, glitter, strings, and other natural elements fuse with fields of paint to create dynamic compositions that blur the boundary between painting and object.

Though entirely abstract, Boxer’s paintings create their own visual atmosphere, inviting viewers to engage in interpretation without the work ever settling into fixed meaning.

Born in New York City in 1926, Stanley Boxer studied at the Art Students League following his service in the Navy during World War II.  His first exhibition took place in 1953 at Perdalma Gallery in New York, beginning a prolific career that would include more than one hundred solo exhibitions.   Boxer received numerous accolades throughout his lifetime, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1975 and a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant in 1989.   His work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate.