
Paintings
75 works

Eyeroll, 2025
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
Eric Stefanski's *Eyeroll* presents the titular word rendered in his characteristic hand-painted script, the letters sprawling across the generous sixty-by-forty-eight-inch canvas with an immediacy that feels both casual and deliberate. The composition centers the text as its sole visual anchor, allowing the typography itself to carry the full weight of meaning. Stefanski's brushwork betrays the gesture behind the word—loose, perhaps slightly exasperated strokes that mirror the physical act an eyeroll implies. The paint application varies in density and saturation, creating moments where pigment pools or thins, lending the surface an organic quality that purely mechanical text could never achieve. What distinguishes Stefanski's practice is his treatment of language as emotional artifact. Words, in his hands, become containers for collective experience, and *Eyeroll* captures a particularly contemporary exhaustion—the weariness of endless information, performative outrage, and social fatigue distilled into a single dismissive gesture. The scale amplifies this sentiment, transforming a fleeting facial expression into something monumental, worthy of sustained attention. There is humor here, certainly, but also a quieter melancholy beneath the sardonic surface. Within Stefanski's broader body of work, *Eyeroll* functions as both continuation and refinement. His text-based paintings consistently mine the space between spoken language and visual form, and this piece demonstrates his increasingly confident ability to locate profound resonance in the vernacular. The work sits comfortably among his explorations of how we communicate feeling in an age of linguistic shortcuts. For acquisition inquiries regarding *Eyeroll*, interested collectors are encouraged to contact Guy Hepner gallery directly.


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.