During his lifetime Stephen Pace met with solid success as a second generation Abstract Expressionist artist, living, working, and exhibiting in the downtown New York art scene where he became friends with Franz Kline, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. His large energetically worked gestural abstractions were clearly on a par with the best of the Abstract Expressionist artists.
Beginning in 1960 Pace began spending time outside New York City in the country of Pennsylvania and Maine, a move which brought the artist back to his childhood roots on a working farm in Missouri. This move ignited his interest in working from nature, and he began producing works like our Unknown from 2004. Such a broad-brushed representational style celebrated everyday life and labor, a theme that resonated from his youth. These works drew on childhood memories. The sheer beauty of our work derives from his visible command of the depiction of horses in a space that is balanced by saturated colors painted almost sketchily on untreated bare canvas. The result is a work reminiscent of Fauvism or Post-Impressionism that is additionally inspired by the works of Avery, Matisse, and Bonnard as well as Chinese painting.
Personal Collection of the Artist
Private Collection of George Schwartz, California