Guy Hepner Gallery

Eric Stefanski Everything You Need For Sale

Eric Stefanski
Eric Stefanski - Everything You Need, 2025, Oil on laminated print

Everything You Need, 2025

Oil on laminated print

35 x 24 in 88.9 x 61 cm

About this work

Eric Stefanski's "Everything You Need" presents the titular phrase rendered in his characteristic hand-painted lettering, the words occupying the picture plane with quiet authority. The oil paint sits atop a laminated print substrate, creating a subtle tension between the mechanical reproduction beneath and the gestural humanity of the painted text above. This layering technique marks an evolution in Stefanski's practice, introducing a material complexity that amplifies the work's meditation on authenticity and emotional truth. The phrase itself carries a deceptive simplicity. Depending on the viewer's state of mind, it reads as reassurance, as challenge, as declaration of sufficiency or perhaps its opposite—a question masked as statement. Stefanski has long understood that words are not merely carriers of meaning but vessels of accumulated feeling, and here the ambiguity feels intentional, almost tender. The scale of the work, at 35 by 24 inches, creates an intimate encounter, as though the message arrives in confidence rather than announcement. Stefanski's text-based paintings have consistently explored how language functions as emotional residue, the traces left behind by human experience and longing. His brush gives typography a pulse, transforming what might otherwise read as graphic design into something unmistakably alive. The imperfections in the letterforms—slight variations in weight, subtle interruptions in line—remind us that a hand made this, that someone chose these words and committed them to surface. For collectors interested in acquiring "Everything You Need," the work is available exclusively through Guy Hepner gallery in New York.

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Edition & Provenance

Year
2025
Medium
Oil on laminated print
Everything You Need

About Eric Stefanski

Eric Stefanski is a Chicago based artist known for large scale abstract paintings that incorporate bold, handwritten text. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2015.

Stefanski's work merges expressive mark making with direct, often humorous or self-deprecating phrases, using language as a way into larger themes around vulnerability, failure, and the pressures of maintaining a creative practice. His large-scale canvases favor vibrant color and bold lettering, with text functioning less as slogan and more as fragments of internal dialogue, blending humor with genuine emotional weight. Through this approach, Stefanski examines what it means to sustain a life as a working artist, treating uncertainty and contradiction as part of the process rather than something to resolve.

His work has been shown extensively in Chicago and Boston, along with solo exhibitions in cities including Tokyo and Madrid, and has continued to expand into galleries and institutions internationally.

He continues to live and work in Chicago.

Guy Hepner works with collectors seeking Eric Stefanski's bold, text-driven abstract paintings. Contact us to discuss available inventory or to inquire about upcoming releases.

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