Linda Stojak: Battle is Internal

In her latest series of paintings, respected American painter Linda Stojak’s elegant, ethereal women emerge from atmospheric color expanses to communicate personal narratives and divine mysteries in a body of new paintings comprising her fourth solo exhibition at LewAllen Galleries, entitled “The Battle is Internal” opening Friday, June 28 and remaining on view through August 10, 2024.
Stojak’s exotically alluring figures materialize out of an otherworldly plane of richly textured surfaces. In her latest paintings, Stojak continues her lifelong exploration of the female form suspended in the fluctuating space of identity and memory. They show off the skills of an artist at the peak of her abilities to address her most vital artistic questions through a uniquely painstaking process that is so time-consuming that she can only produce a few paintings a year.
This laborious artistic process mirrors her figures’ transitory state of being and non-being, corporeality and erasure. To achieve this otherworldly effect, Stojak applies oil paint with a palette knife only to scrape it away, again and again. Her paintings are worked and reworked in a similar process of building up, scraping, and scuffing to one employed by the late leading Bay Area painter Nathan Oliviera to allow his uneasy human figures to slowly materialize from the void.
This creative process, of building up and scraping away, is Stojak’s clearest signal of intent: each painting is as personal as a self-portrait, and as elusive as memory. And just like memory, the more that is added through time and experience, the more that is inevitably erased. Her figures give the distinct feeling of familiarity tinged with uncertainty, just as one can be simultaneously so sure of and so unreliable about one’s own past. Her figures are as ghostly as the human body and as substantive as memory, emerging briefly before receding back into that numinous color space to transform and reform onto her canvas.
A recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, Linda Stojak (b. 1955) is an accomplished painter whose successful career spans more than four decades. Her honors include a Leeway Grant, a Distinguished Achievement Award from Arcadia University, and an artist residency in Toblach, Italy.
Notably, Stojak has garnered critical reviews in Art in America, Artforum, and The New York Times. Her paintings can be found in prominent museum and private collections across the United States. Stojak received her MFA from the Pratt Institute and is now based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Learn more at www.lewallengalleries.com/artist/linda-stojak