Eric Stefanski Queen (of Hearts) For Sale

About this work

Eric Stefanski's "Queen (of Hearts)" presents the titular phrase rendered in his characteristic text-based approach, where language becomes both subject and form. The words occupy the canvas with deliberate weight, their letterforms emerging through layers of oil paint that carry the accumulated texture of the artist's process. Stefanski builds his surfaces through repetition and erasure, allowing previous iterations to ghost through the final composition—a palimpsest of intention and revision that mirrors how we return to certain words, certain ideas, until they become worn smooth by handling. The piece trades on the immediate recognition of its source material—the playing card, the Lewis Carroll villain, the endearment—while stripping away illustration entirely. What remains is the phrase itself, suspended between tenderness and threat. The color relationships Stefanski employs create an atmospheric tension, with the background functioning not as empty space but as emotional weather surrounding the text. There is something vulnerable in this refusal of imagery, an insistence that words alone can hold feeling. Within Stefanski's broader practice, "Queen (of Hearts)" continues his investigation of how language functions as emotional residue. His canvases treat text as material reality rather than transparent meaning-making, asking viewers to sit with the physical presence of words before their definitions. The scale invites intimate viewing, a private audience with a phrase that has been spoken countless times yet here achieves a kind of stillness. For acquisition inquiries regarding "Queen (of Hearts)" and other works by Eric Stefanski, please contact Guy Hepner gallery in New York.