Eric Stefanski Hoping, Praying, Wishing For Sale

About this work

Eric Stefanski's *Hoping, Praying, Wishing* presents its titular phrase as both subject and surface, the words rendered in the artist's characteristic approach where language becomes a vehicle for accumulated feeling rather than mere communication. The three words stack or interweave across the canvas, their repetition creating a visual rhythm that mirrors the cyclical nature of longing itself—the way we return again and again to the same unspoken appeals. Stefanski's brushwork allows the letters to blur at their edges, suggesting breath, erosion, or the way meaning softens through overuse. The scale of the work, at sixty by forty-eight inches, gives these intimate words a monumental presence, transforming private incantation into public declaration. The emotional register here is one of suspended yearning. These are words spoken into darkness, addressed to no one and everyone—the vocabulary of sleeplessness, of waiting rooms, of hands clasped in uncertainty. Stefanski treats text not as graphic element but as emotional residue, and in this work the residue is particularly tender, capturing that liminal space where hope has not yet calcified into disappointment. The painting sits comfortably within his broader practice of excavating the weight words carry when stripped of context and allowed to exist as pure feeling on canvas. *Hoping, Praying, Wishing* demonstrates Stefanski's continued refinement of text-based painting as a medium for exploring interior states that resist easy articulation. For acquisition inquiries, please contact Guy Hepner gallery in New York.