Harper’s is pleased to announce I’m a Genius, I’m a Fraud, Chicago-based artist Eric Stefanski’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new paintings by Stefanski and opens Saturday, June 29, 6–8pm.
Eric Stefanski’s diaristic visual practice is at once personal and historiographic. With routine discipline, the painter writes every day, translating the banal and at times frustrating realities of being a professional artist into long-form text. He then pares down these reflections into striking phrases: biting one-liners describe a spectrum of affects ranging from the most harrowing emotions to those inexplicably humorous moments that embellish creative production.
These declarations, though intimately tethered to the artist’s interiority, gesture towards universal sentiments. They grapple with existential questions that span motifs like failure, hubris, death, and external perception—common themes that reflect the turbulent life of an artist, but also, speak to quotidian trials and tribulations across fields. As Stefanski renders this landscape of feelings, he complicates the patriarchal lore of the ineffable artist within art history.
Stefanski invokes flamboyant pigmentation to contend with these legacies of hypermasculinity in painting. Flashy pink, purple, and yellow tones provide levity within his works as they frame searing provocations like in Have Some Fucking Confidence. Here, with commanding brushstroke, Stefanski writes the following in bubblegum pink pigment: “HAVE SOME FUCKIN CONFIDENCE IN WHAT YOU ARE DOING.” This easier-said-than-done affirmation blazes across swaths of kelly green paint. Ultimately, as the artist bedecks this intrepid statement with hues socially coded as feminine, he slices through gendered constructs that continue to inform narratives of power, tenacity, and success in the art world and beyond.
It is clear here and throughout I’m a Genius, I’m a Fraud that Stefanski is adept at transforming his most vulnerable ruminations into compelling critiques of the ironclad paradigms of the art world and society at large. He unravels the mystique of the infallible genius artist again in the titular work. Within this stirring work, Stefanski arranges the phrases “I’m a Genius” and “I’m a Fraud” in a dizzying stream of repetition. Painted in black and white, these declarations slip into the realm of abstraction as they descend the canvas and merge into one complex sentence.
For Stefanski, to uphold a creative practice is to constantly reckon with a nagging imposter syndrome. On good days, experimentation might feel fruitful; other times, one might discard new work altogether. Much like these fundamental processes of rejection, celebration, and annotation in the studio, Stefanski, across I’m a Genius, I’m a Fraud, reminds viewers that the art historical canon is meant to be troubled. He asserts that the tradition should always be interrogated with curiosity and discernment. These incisive new works visualize Stefanski’s journey of disciplinary analysis and personal reflection. By debunking the coveted rituals of creation itself, the artist shows us that the true masters of art are the most inquisitive students.
Eric Stefanski (b. 1987, Chicago, IL) received a BA from DePaul University in 2009, and an MFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2015. His work has been the subject of presentations at VSOP Projects, Greenport, NY (2023 and 2021); Garna Gallery, Madrid (2023); Margin Gallery, Tokyo (2023); Bill Arning Exhibitions, Houston (2022); and Baby Blue Gallery, Chicago (2018 and 2017). Most recently, Stefanski has participated in group exhibitions at Harper’s, East Hampton (2024 and 2021); Rich Art Gallery, Taichung, TW (2024); Contemporary Cluster, Rome (2022); and Monica King Contemporary, New York (2021). Reviews of his work have appeared in Boston Globe and Voyage Chicago. Stefanski lives and works in Chicago.