Gallery owner Stefan Stux describes himself as being from “a part of Austro-Hungary known today as Western Romania” but he immigrated to the USA at the age of 22, in 1964. He completed his doctorate at New York University and was a member of the faculty of Harvard University for some time before opening his first gallery in Boston in 1980. The Boston Gallery was a great success and in 1986 Stux opened his New York gallery which has been gaining more and more attention every since. Among the artists that Stux has represented or exhibited are Andrès Serrano, Inka Essenhigh, Su-En Wong, Jennifer Reeves, Jay Davis, James Busby, Angelina Nasso and Dennis Oppenheim. Stux now has a large ground-floor gallery on West 25th Street, in the heart of the Chelsea gallery district.
Stux’ declared interest is in “art that transforms from avant-garde to art history as I watch it happen”. In New York’s cut-throat art world, he has a high profile but also a reputation for nurturing new talent and supporting mid-career artists who often find it hard to get their message across in the money-intensive atmosphere that the fast-track art dealers breathe. Among the twenty-four artists Stux currently represents are two women from Iceland. Both have had solo exhibitions in the gallery in the last year and both are being enthusiastically received by the New York critics.
Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir was born in Iceland and studied in Reykjavík and in New York where she graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2003. She first exhibited in the Stefan Stux Gallery fresh out of school but her work attracted attention and review. Writing in Art in America, Gregory Volk wrote that Þórdís’ paintings “quietly communicate a range of emotions or states of being, from painful loneliness to introspection, eroticism, whimsy and bliss”. The expectations of this first exhibition were borne out in her second private show in Stux’ new and expanded gallery in Chelsea last winter. Þórdís is now exhibiting in Reykjavik at Gallery 101.
Stux’ other Icelandic artist is Anna Jóelsdóttir who for the last several years has been working out of Chicago, where she finished her MFA in 2002 from the School of the Art Institute. She has held no fewer than seven solo exhibitions in the last five years but is now for the first time represented in New York. Her exhibition at Stux in June and July this summer get a very good reception, including a review in New Yorker Magazine. Though Anna has held two solo shows in Iceland – in Hafnarborg in 2000 and again in 2003 – the main focus of her activity has been in the United States and she has taken part in numerous exhibitions in Chicago.
JP
