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  Stevovich, born in Austria, moved to the United States in 1950 with his parents. He grew up in Washington D.C. where the National Gallery of Art quickly became his second home. "While other kids were going to baseball games, I was staring at the Old Masters," says Stevovich. He continued his studies, obtaining a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design under Gordon Peers and an MFA at the Masssachusetts College of Art. His meticulous eye for detail and color, his precise draftsmanship, Venetian palette and polished surfaces combined with Renaissance inspired figurative realism and 20th century Surrealism have furnished Stevovich with a style that is technically brilliant and aesthetically satisfying. Stevovich transports the viewer to modern everyday locations (beaches, subways, restaurants, racetracks, bars) as a hidden observer. Whether alone or seemingly alone in a crowd, Stevovich's characters are quietly preoccupied with the universal dramas of modern life: isolation, narcissism, boredom, the longing for intimacy and the fear of it. By virtue of his imagination, the narrative intrigues the viewer to contemplate their own interpretation. With more than 30 decades of work, 20 solo exhibitions and over 45 group exhibitions to his credit, this is the most extensive mid-career survey of Andrew Stevovich's oeuvre to date. This oversized hardcover monograph with 164 pages of full color reproductions is partnered with texts by Anita Shreve ( best-selling novelist: The Pilot's Wife, A Wedding in December) Carol Diehl (features writer, for Art in America) and John Sacret Young (television producer and writer - China Beach, The West Wing, and author of The Weather Tomorrow, a novel). "Occasionally, an artist's subject matter, technique and execution coincide with the cultural life of a given period. Such an event is occurring with Andrew Stevovich, master of wit, half-stories, pure line, daring color and flawless finishes. To view one of his canvases is to feel as though one has just had an apple martini at the King Cole Bar, or read a Jonathan Saffran Foer novel, or glimpsed on the street an enigmatic brunette in red lipstick and matching leather gloves take the hand of a bumbling European-looking man for whom we might have fond feelings. Though Stevovich has been showing his work for three and a half decades, his representational/abstract canvases have always seemed ahead of his time, out-of-sync, cutting-edge. That edge has arrived." |
