reviews
"Extraordinary Images"Andre Emmerich Gallery, NYC
"These works evidence homogeneity of style, color scheme, touch and paint consistency."
Harry Rand, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute
"As director of "ART:USA", and for the collection amassed for S.C.Johnson that toured the USA including the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. and the Whitney here in New York, I believe Stephen Kerner's paintings will be evaluated esthetically as well as financially, with Rivers and Motherwell all of whom appeared in that tour."Jack Walters
Stephen Kerner's work enriches the art scene in New York with his dynamic, subtle and profound creations."Amnon Barzel, curator and director of the Pecci Museum of Contemporary Art, Prato, Italy and former director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin
Exhibited and acquired by museums and private collections around the world including The Rose Art Museum, The Smithsonian Institute, The Painted Bride Museum, The Celle Museum, Rene Shapshax Museum and National Museum of Belgrade, Stephen Kerner's paintings evolve out of an immersion into the relentless probing of one's inner life to reveal the hidden forces that determine behavior and identity in ways that are not visible on the surfaced. He relies on pure spontaneous free association . . . organizing his painting as though he was playing jazz. Instead of setting out a narrative or portraying a scene from nature or even following the rigors of formal abstraction that convey meaning through a systematic structure, he uses this free association to reveal the disorderly hidden content of the unconscious mind.
What is so different about the work of Kerner, in particular, is that he uses automatist techniques derived from surrealism as tools for eliciting and recording the immediacy of an intuitive train of introspective thought . . . as it is unfolding to reveal something about the true nature of our identity. As the flow of ideas accelerate in speed and emotional directness, the totemic imagery of these works gives way to a painting of pure gesture.
As compared to conventional painting, what Kerner does that is so important is to entirely separate the brushstroke from the task of description, so that it is only about empathetic evocation of the artist's emotion providing a true map of the artist's mind.
Jack Walters, ART: USA
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