Amarbelmanshonor

Literature

Stanley Boxer produced a richly varied body of work for more than four decades. He drew from many modernist idioms, often uniting the gestural approach of Abstract Expressionism with the pure opticality of Color Field painting, although he never entirely allied himself with any movement or category. He was known for troweling on pigment, using his fingers, brushes and a palette knife to create textures and patterns; he was renowned for thickly painted Abstract works.

Stanley Boxer was born in New York City and grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he returned to New York and, with funds from the G.I. Bill, enrolled at New York’s Art Students League. His first exhibition was held in 1953 at Perdalma Gallery in New York, where he also showed in 1954 and 1955.

In 1968, Stanley Boxer had two solo shows: one featuring sculpture at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York and the other, presenting paintings at the Loeb Center of New York University. In the years that followed, Stanley Boxer also created collages, drawings, and monotypes, receiving acclaim consistently for his work. Harry Rand wrote of his 1977 exhibition at André Emmerich Gallery: “Much that was gradually leached out of recent painting has just been returned to
it in an exhibition so clearly important that it will be one we reckon with. Stanley Boxer’s show returns to us a major cultural artifact we have not had for over a decade: the work of a living painter worthy of measuring the rest of everybody’s production against.”1 Boxer had many solo shows at Andre Emmerich and various galleries throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The work Boxer produced in this period continued to be well received by his clientele and lauded by the critics. Karen Wilkin wrote in 1996 that Boxer’s show of recent large canvases, coinciding with his seventieth birthday “included some of his best work to date.” 2

Stanley Boxer’s work may be found in noted private and public collections in the United States and in other countries, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Center, Washington, D.C.; Houston Museum of Art, Texas; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Museum of the Twentieth Century, Vienna; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

1 Harry Rand, “Stanley Boxer,” Arts Magazine (May 1977)
2 Karen Wilkin, “Stanley Boxer at Salander O’Reilly,” Partisan
Review (1996).