
Paintings
75 works

Remember When, 2025
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
Eric Stefanski's "Remember When" presents a contemplative meditation on nostalgia and the weight of shared history, rendered in the artist's signature text-based approach. The phrase itself—universal yet deeply personal—emerges from the canvas surface with the quiet insistence of memory surfacing unbidden. Stefanski's brushwork builds the letterforms through layered applications of oil paint, creating subtle dimensionality that rewards extended viewing. The words appear neither shouted nor whispered but spoken in that intimate register reserved for moments of genuine reflection between people who have weathered time together. The composition balances negative space against the density of the text, allowing the viewer's eye to move between reading and pure visual absorption. Color choices establish an emotional temperature that oscillates between warmth and melancholy—the bittersweet territory that the phrase itself occupies in common usage. Surface texture varies across the canvas, with areas of smooth application contrasting against more gestural passages, suggesting the uneven terrain of recollection itself. Within Stefanski's broader practice, "Remember When" exemplifies his ongoing investigation into language as both visual form and emotional vessel. His work consistently explores how familiar phrases carry accumulated feeling, how words become containers for experiences that exceed their literal meanings. The painting does not illustrate memory but rather enacts the experience of encountering it—sudden, loaded, impossible to dismiss. At sixty by forty-eight inches, the scale commands presence while maintaining the intimacy essential to its subject matter. For acquisition inquiries, collectors may 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.