
Paintings
75 works

Tell Me What Feels Good, 2023
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
Eric Stefanski's "Tell Me What Feels Good" presents the titular phrase rendered in his characteristic gestural script, the words sprawling across the canvas with an intimacy that borders on confrontation. The oil paint sits thick in places, thinning at the edges of each letter where the brush lifted or dragged, creating a sense of urgency in the mark-making itself. Stefanski's palette here feels deliberate yet emotionally charged—the text emerges from or dissolves into the ground, depending on how long one lingers with the work. The phrase operates on multiple registers simultaneously. It reads as a lover's whisper, a therapist's prompt, a desperate plea for connection, or perhaps an invitation to vulnerability. This ambiguity is central to Stefanski's practice, where language becomes untethered from singular meaning and instead functions as emotional architecture. The words are not illustrations of feeling but rather conduits for it, carrying the accumulated weight of every context in which they might be spoken or heard. At sixty by forty-eight inches, the scale demands physical engagement. One cannot passively observe text at this size—it enters peripheral vision, surrounds the viewer, insists on being read aloud even if only internally. Stefanski understands that words carry residue, that certain phrases lodge themselves in memory and resurface unbidden. By isolating and enlarging this particular sentence, he transforms casual language into monument, asking us to sit with both the comfort and the ache embedded in such a simple request. For acquisition inquiries regarding this work, please contact Guy Hepner gallery directly.


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.