Candy Go Lightly, 2015 (SOLD)
38” x 38”
Mixed Media
Cupid Conspiracy, (After Boucher), 2022 (SOLD)
17” x 22”
Digitally Produced Print, Edition 1 of 5
Diana After The Hunt II, (After Boucher), 2022
17” x 22”
Digitally Produced Print, Edition 1 of 5
Diana And Liz After The Hunt, 2016 - 2023 (SOLD)
40” x 60”
Mixed Media
Music And Dance, (After Boucher), 2022 (SOLD)
17” x 30”
Digitally Produced Print On Acrylic Panel
The Rape Of Europa, (After Boucher And Vasarely), 2022
13” x 19”
Digitally Produced Print, Edition 1 of 5
The Toilette Of Venus, (After Boucher And Morris Louis), 2022
13” x 19”
Digitally Produced Print, Edition 1 of 5
Venus Disarming Cupid, (After Boucher And Twombly), 2022
13” x 19”
Digitally Produced Print, Edition 1 of 5
"I appreciate the Rococo for its extravagance and theatricality, as it appeals to my love of kitsch."
- Stuart Netsky
Why Do Artists Make Skate Decks?
54.5" x 43.5" x 2".
Mixed Media
I am a conceptual artist making paintings, mixed media sculptures, prints and other objects. My practice is an investigation into the inundation of imagery we are all collectively bombarded by, and how it reflects the absurdity I experience in our contemporary culture.
My work is made in distinct series, creating a crazy quilt of pictorial eclecticism that obscures our ability to make sense of the image, acting as a metaphor for the confusion and shifting dichotomies in social interactions.
Digital images speak to our technologically driven world and reflect the temporal paradox in pop culture whereby the past is brought to the present, the present to the past. I digitally appropriate art historical images with those from film and popular culture, juxtaposed with psychedelic and floral patterns and mix them all together. Francois Boucher and Gerhard Richter, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Gene Davis, Bridget Riley, Nicholas Krushenick and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among others - the rococo and abstraction, op art and pop art, anime and realism, and the psychedelic all come together, layered, spliced, and distorted. I appreciate the Rococo for its extravagance and theatricality, as it appeals to my love of kitsch. Paintings, prints and sculptures, collaged with cakes, printed skate decks and fake fur create an extravagant hodge-podge of seemingly disparate imagery and materials that evoke the psychosexual.
Film imagery is another element important to my work. I grew up comforted by the classic Hollywood films and actors I reference in my work. As a gay adolescent, I escaped into film and identified with the women in what are considered "women’s films". Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and femme fatales, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth...idealized much like the goddesses in Rococo painting. I love them all, and sometimes view my practice as a drag display operating within this time I live in while embracing nostalgia and romanticism for their tender and universal sensibilities.
"I digitally appropriate art historical images with those from film and popular culture, juxtaposed with psychedelic and floral patterns and mix them all together. Francois Boucher and Gerhard Richter, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Gene Davis, Bridget Riley, Nicholas Krushenick and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among others - the rococo and abstraction, op art and pop art, anime and realism, and the psychedelic all come together, layered, spliced, and distorted."
- Stuart Netsky
Between Two Worlds
16" x 9" x 9"
Mixed Media
Stuart Jan Netsky was born in Philadelphia, PA. In 1977 through 1983, Netsky was the President and head designer of his own millinery design company in New York City. In 1983, he received a Bachelor of Science in Design and Merchandising from Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. Since 1984, Netsky has been pursuing his career as a professional artist. He received a Master of Art in Art Education from Philadelphia College of Art in 1986 and went on to receive a Master of Fine Art in sculpture from Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, PA in 1990.
Netsky was an Adjunct Professor at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Jefferson University.
Stuart Netsky has had solo exhibitions of his work at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Richard Anderson, NYC, Locks Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, and a retrospective at the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts. He has also shown in innumerable group shows nationally and internationally. In 1995, he received the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His work is in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, as well as the Johnson and Johnson Collection and many private collections.
Untitled
45″ x 33.5″ x 2″
Mixed Media
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
– Henry David Thoreau
Gross McCleaf Gallery invites you to experience the magic of summer with a group exhibition titled Summer Playlist. Curated like a finely tuned mixtape, this vibrant selection of works explores seasonal themes of celebration, relaxation, and engagement with nature.
In this feature by Clayton Campbell, we're introduced (and for some of us re-introduced) to Stuart Netsky, a seminal Philadelphia artist and arts educator who has shown widely in the City, although not recently. Netsky's new works at Gross McCleaf Gallery were sparked by the pandemic, as many of his earlier works circled around the AIDS epidemic. Be sure to read this fine feature about an important local artist and run to see the exhibit, which ends this Saturday, March 25, 2023.
The arc of Stuart Netsky’s practice has so far been bookended by the AIDs epidemic and the COVID pandemic. A long-time resident and well known artist in Philadelphia, his current exhibition Walking Backward into the Future, at Gross McCleaf Gallery through March 25th, manifests the charming and incisive continuum of an eclectic, sophisticated artmaker.
Elizabeth Johnson: Your prints in your current show join radically different images to express the visual overkill of contemporary culture, but it seems that you aren’t entirely critical of the excess, since you revel in it. Do you enjoy scrolling though social media or jumping between cinematic decades via streaming? How does the seam between images function for you? Does it indicate a jump in thought and/or time and function to compress a group of dramatic moments into a whole? Are you aiming to compare several unrelated high points of Western culture? or to express the vastness of cultural experience?
Stuart Netsky: I do revel in excess to express the visual overkill...
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Stuart Netsky’s rich digital paintings and colorful sculptural assemblages in Walking Backward into the Future. Here, Netsky continues his innovative exploration of materials and themes well known from his seminal 1992 ICA exhibition, Time Flies. This earlier work, created during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, courageously explored the intersections of the HIV/AIDS epidemic with contemporary domestic life, popular culture, and Western art history. During Netsky’s retrospective in 2006, Rosenwald Wolf Gallery Curator Sid Sachs described Netsky as having a practice that, “operates at the nexus of social representation and sculpture, sexual cliché, and self-presentation. Echoing a variety of historical styles such as Pop Art, Pattern and Decoration, and color field, Netsky retains a crisp classical sense of craft and sense of humor that is deadly serious.” His latest work is no exception as Netsky continues with a clear-eyed honesty and queer sensibility.
