Steven Assael's Bio

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Steven Assael's style is unique and has characteristic sense of light and shadow to illuminate the characters - paintings and drawings. Steven Assael is one of the most famous present living artists of our time. He presently teaches at The School of Visual Arts in New York. He studied at Pratt Institute, NYC and with fine art instructors as Robert Beverly Hale and David Leffel. He is known for his conscientious focus on visual truth combined with his compassion sensibility for the human condition transform his figures into towering works of art.

He is also one of the most inspirational and original masterful realist draftsmen/painters of our time. His poignant renderings of the details of life's struggles leave the viewer agape at not only their own immortality, but also at the detailed imagery he creates. Add to that his warm personality, and you have the makings of an incredible artist and instructor.

Steven Assael was born in New York, New York in 1957. He attended Pratt Institute and presently teaches at The School of Visual Arts in New York. Mr. Assael balances naturalism with a romanticism that permeates the figures and surroundings of his paintings and drawings. The focus of his work is the human figure, either individually or in a group, rendered in glowing relief by gentle beams of warm and cool light. Steven Assael's classical talents are as rare as they are essential to the diverse art world of the late Twentieth Century.

Assael has had several solo shows nationally in recent months, including the Columbus Museum of Art, Cress Gallery of Art at the University of Tennessee, Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, and Forum Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1999, a retrospective one-person exhibition was held at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington. Steven Assael's work has also been exhibited at The Arkansas Arts Center, (AR), The New York Academy of Art, (NY), The Arnot Art Museum in (NY) and is represented in the public collections of The Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, (TN), The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art & Design (MO), The Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY).


March 5, 2009, New York, NY - Steven Assael, the New York artist hailed by The Art Newspaper as "the foremost figurative painter of his generation", will exhibit his latest paintings and drawings at Forum Gallery, New York, from March 19 to May 2, 2009. The exhibition, Assael's seventh since joining the Gallery in 1998, focuses on public and private aspects of urban life and explores issues of intimacy, gender and personal identity. The portraits and narratives the artist paints touch on contact, isolation, sexuality and the journey through life.

In the paintings, Steven Assael employs his unique, characteristic sense of light and shadow to illuminate the characters and lives of his subjects. A featured painting, Crowd #1, 2009, oil on canvas, 72" x 96", was exhibited by Forum Gallery at The Armory Show Modern (New York, March 5-9) to preview the forthcoming exhibition. In this major work, Assael leaves specific location and narrative to the viewer. He shows a crowd of infinite number and depth, people to whom we relate but who do not relate to each other, no matter how close the gathering.

The drawings are striking in their detail and accuracy, always used in the interest and exploration of intimate moments of introspection. All of the drawings and paintings in the exhibition have been created since 2006.

Steven Assael's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at museums from Chattanooga to Seattle and at galleries throughout the United States. Works have been chosen for curated group exhibitions at the Naples Museum of Art, FL; the Arkansas Art Center, the Evansville Museum, IN; and the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK; among many. Paintings and drawings can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art & Design, Kansas City; The Columbus Museum, GA; and many other museum and distinguished private collections.