BIO
Abbott Stillman started painting in the 1980s, never intending to show his work beyond family and friends. The artist had a successful career in real estate development and all the while maintained a studio practice that, over the course of these many years, has produced a remarkable depth and breadth of work. If there is a through line to his collected paintings it consists of some combination of ambiguity, exuberance, balance, and harmony all in service to his central, and optimistic, beliefs about the human condition.
His paintings are compositions of rich color, often in abstracted grounds and spaces that evoke deep emotional responses. Stillman's love for painting is pure and abiding: it is driven by a compulsion to create, deep gratitude for the human experience, his desire to offer joy as a counter to suffering, and his reveling in the medium that has a long history of seeking to repair a fractured world. But sometimes motives and causes are just very simple. Stillman himself says it best: “In the end, the essence of my process is that I let the paint and the canvas tell me what to paint. When I’m doing my best work, it feels like it’s coming through me, instead of from me.”
Stillman attended MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning as a Mellon Fellow. His attraction to that education can be traced all the way back to the many trips his mother initiated during his childhood to MoMA and the Met, as a result of which he developed a “painterly” eye and a deep appreciation for the courage of an artist who conjures something out of unbridled imagination. After graduating from MIT he built an award-winning and highly respected career– in good part because of his deep understanding of the creative process and his close collaborations with the designers of every building he conceived and constructed. One notable property he developed is Three Lincoln Center, a 1,000,000 square foot mixed-use property that constitutes the northwest corner of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (NYC). Another is a 360,000 square foot office building a few blocks from the White House, leading to his first public artwork: LowRez/HiFi, which was conceived and then collaborated on with architects, musicians and LED designers. The artwork combined a sound-and-light grove and LED-based kinetic building signage. It was selected by the Cooper Hewitt Museum for their 2007 Triennial, and subsequently displayed at The Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston.
