Guy Hepner Gallery

Eric Stefanski Put Your Heart In My Chest For Sale

Eric Stefanski
Eric Stefanski - Put Your Heart In My Chest, 2023, Oil on canvas

Put Your Heart In My Chest, 2023

Oil on canvas

20 x 16 in 50.8 x 40.6 cm

About this work

Eric Stefanski's "Put Your Heart In My Chest" presents a stark declaration rendered in the artist's signature text-based approach, transforming intimate language into visual confrontation. The phrase stretches across the canvas with an urgency that feels both vulnerable and demanding, the words functioning simultaneously as plea and offering. Stefanski's brushwork carries the weight of the statement, with oil paint building texture that gives each letter a physical presence beyond mere typography. The compositional arrangement draws the eye across the surface in a deliberate reading, forcing viewers to speak the words internally and thereby participate in the emotional exchange the piece proposes. Within Stefanski's broader practice, language operates as emotional residue—traces of conversations, thoughts, or feelings that persist after their original context has dissolved. "Put Your Heart In My Chest" exemplifies this approach, isolating a fragment of profound intimacy and suspending it in the permanence of paint. The statement suggests an almost surgical desire for connection, a wish to carry another person's emotional center within one's own body. This literalization of empathy and love speaks to contemporary longings for genuine closeness in an increasingly mediated world. The 20 x 16 inch scale creates an intimate viewing experience, requiring proximity that mirrors the closeness the words themselves request. Stefanski's text paintings collapse the distance between visual art and poetry, between seeing and reading, between artist and viewer. For acquisition inquiries regarding this work, please contact Guy Hepner gallery in New York.

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Edition & Provenance

Year
2023
Medium
Oil on canvas
Put Your Heart In My Chest

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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