Stephen Maine

Stephen Maine is an American painter, critic and curator. As an artist, he is known for abstract paintings that he produces by low-tech, mechanical means, applying paint to canvas and paper with intermediary surfaces used like printing plates. The paintings are notable for their conceptual implications with regard to core art tenets such as personal expression, intention and representation, with critics highlighting their reference to—and simultaneous divergence from—art-historical works and movements that employed impersonal methods of art making. Brooklyn Rail critic Tom McGlynn wrote, "Maine makes a restrained but compelling case for gestural abstraction's residual ability to touch a nerve," with "non-decisional" works grounded in "a playful suspension of the often-fraught debate between the dogmatically formal and the informality of associative illusion."