There is a point at which the real and the imagined become the same thing. Stacy Stewart Smith has spent twenty years working in that space.
Abstractrealism is not a movement. It is a method — and a position. It begins with the world as it is: iron lattice dissolving into light, a figure suspended in a cloudy sky, the interior of a subway car rendered in graphite and gesso. Then it asks what else is present, what the eye cannot fully resolve. What the mind supplies when the image begins to dissolve.
Smith’s paintings do not choose between representation and abstraction. They insist that the tension between the two is where meaning lives — in the threshold, the blur, the stenciled square of pigment interrupting an otherwise legible surface. He calls these interruptions pixels. They function like parentheses in the mind.
The works collected here span more than two decades of practice — from the intimate Study for Faith painted on a New York City MetroCard in a Brooklyn studio in 2006, to the monumental Temptation (54″ × 80″), the closing work of the Resurrection series. They have been exhibited at the Museum at FIT, Gallery Guichard in Chicago, and the Stacy Stewart Smith Gallery in Brooklyn. They are original paintings, each signed, each shipped from New York City.
The Armory Show opens September 24, 2026, in New York City. For those in the city that week — and those who are not — the work is here.
