Stefanelli /
Hammerstein.
Year
Fall 2009
Type
Two-Person Exhibition
Artists
2 artists
Location
Croton Falls, NY
About This Exhibition
A living link to
Abstract Expressionism.
And what came next.
Stefanelli / Hammerstein brought together two painters separated by generations but connected by a shared commitment to abstraction and a shared address in the Hudson Valley. The exhibition ran October through November 2009 — just months after Lift Trucks Art opened with From a Factory Floor — and made an immediate case for the kind of programming the space was capable of.
Joe Stefanelli was 87 years old at the time of the show. He is the last surviving second-generation Abstract Expressionist — a painter who came of age at the Cedar Bar alongside Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock, and who kept working with the same directness and commitment for decades after that world dissolved. The exhibition presented 20 oils, 18 watercolors spanning from the 1940s to 2002, and figure drawings that demonstrated, in curator Danielle Arps’s words, “masterful drawing with complete freedom.”
“The exploding color, charm and emotion of mid-century abstract expressionism — and the proof that it never really went away.”
Lift Trucks Art · Stefanelli / Hammerstein · 2009
Andy Hammerstein III is the great-great grandson of Broadway composer Oscar Hammerstein. His paintings and drawings in the exhibition were inspired by his experience driving the Saw Mill Parkway at night — the geometry of light, movement, and highway infrastructure abstracted into color and form. Five paintings and twenty drawings traced that sustained observation of a specific road over time.
Together, the two bodies of work asked a simple question: what does it mean to look carefully at the world and respond to it honestly? Stefanelli answered it with the weight of a career spanning the birth of Abstract Expressionism. Hammerstein answered it with the attentiveness of a painter still finding his ground.
Featured Artists
Joe Stefanelli
Artist
Andy Hammerstein III
Artist
Plan Your Visit
3 East Cross Street
Croton Falls, NY 10519
The Collection
Work that connects
then to now.
Stefanelli’s paintings are part of the permanent collection at Lift Trucks Art. The showroom is open by appointment — come see a living connection to the history of American painting.
87
Stefanelli’s age at the show
38
Stefanelli works on view
1940s
Earliest works in the show
Free
Always free to visit