Jason Stopa: Open Window

Morgan Lehman Gallery presents Open Window, an exhibition of new oil paintings by Jason Stopa, his second solo presentation with the gallery. The ten abstract paintings in this show make reference to painting as a window, an aperture-like space in which structural, geometric form is contrasted by lyrical, interlocking forms. Their interplay positions the viewer as if looking through panes of glass, with reflections and shadows cast on the other side. Frames and lattices recur throughout to reinforce this reading, marking the picture plane as a threshold that invites us behind emotive veils of color.

Breaking away from his previous work, Stopa uses thin, gestural washes of oil paint to loosen his archetypal shapes, ornamental patterns, and other motifs that call to mind monolithic buildings and decorative objects. The palette is also more subdued than the high-intensity color Stopa is known for, and this quieter register blurs those underlying structures into one another. Forms that recall both ancient and 20th century architecture overlap to create negative space and constant figure-ground reversals, so that each shape reads as object and as opening in turn. Light makes this optical flickering possible. The paintings draw on an idea familiar from Nabi and Fauve circles, that an object is only a part of space, defined by the light surrounding it, much as a pane of glass is known by what it reflects and what shows through. Yet the surfaces do not let the eye pass straight through. Instead, Stopa layers paint to approximate the ceramic glaze of Ancient Greek pottery, as he attends to the density of pigment and the way touch can imbue a surface with a sense of personhood.

These questions of looking through and looking at carry into the gallery itself. A wall painting in the gallery room to the left, as we enter the space, continues Stopa’s earlier wall installations of gates and stages, in which the painted wall serves as a stage for hung works that are themselves shallow stages. Here the idea of the window floods the physical architecture of the gallery in the form of a yellow grid painted directly onto the wall. Stopa considers a painting’s relationship to the wall and the social dimensions of the site, grounding that inquiry in the window, the grid, and the monolith, the vocabulary of Modernism. Open Window, as a whole, knowingly engages with abstract painting’s history and the interplay between viewer and object, revealing how sensory experience is both static and fugitive.

Jason Stopa is a painter and writer living in Brooklyn. Recent solo exhibitions include “Modern Language” at The Schneider Museum, Ashland, OR (2025), “Interior Monument” at Sevil Dolmaci Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey (2025) and “Glass Arcadia” at Thomas Park Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2024). His paintings have been reviewed in Artforum, Galerie Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Criterion and Vogue. He completed his BFA at Indiana University and his MFA at Pratt Institute. Stopa is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at FIT. He is a contributing writer to Artforum, BOMB, Momus, The Brooklyn Rail, among other art journals.