
Paintings
75 works

Let's Stay Up All Night & Break Each Other's Hearts, 2023
Oil on canvas
60 x 84 in 152.4 x 213.4 cm
Eric Stefanski's *Let's Stay Up All Night & Break Each Other's Hearts* delivers its titular phrase across a monumental canvas, the words functioning simultaneously as image, confession, and proposition. The scale—sixty by eighty-four inches—transforms what might read as a whispered intimacy into something confrontational, a declaration that fills peripheral vision and demands the viewer's full attention. Stefanski's characteristic approach to text-based painting is evident in the treatment of letterforms, which carry the weight of their meaning through deliberate brushwork, color choice, and compositional tension. The oil medium allows for subtle gradations and a luminosity that acrylic cannot replicate, lending the work an almost romantic quality that mirrors its content. The emotional register here is one of knowing vulnerability—the phrase acknowledges inevitable damage while extending an invitation anyway. There's a recklessness to it, a willingness to trade sleep and safety for connection, however temporary or costly. Stefanski treats language not as graphic design but as emotional residue, the trace left behind after experience has passed. Each letter becomes a site of feeling rather than mere communication. Within Stefanski's broader practice, this work exemplifies his interest in capturing the charged space between people, those moments where words carry more than their dictionary definitions. The painting joins a body of work that treats the vernacular of longing, regret, and desire with the seriousness typically reserved for traditional subject matter. For acquisition inquiries regarding this work by Eric Stefanski, please contact Guy Hepner gallery in New York.


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.