Emerging on the London art scene in the 1960s, Ian Stephenson was one of several British artists whose work featured in Michelangelo Antonioni’s influential film Blow-Up (1966), alongside Alan Davie, whose work is displayed nearby. The following year he embarked upon a series of twelve dioramas, each consisting of two square canvases covered in small colored dots, in which the same image is repeated as if through an inverted mirror. Though Stephenson’s abstraction is suggestive of postwar American painting, and even the pointillism of Georges Seurat, he preferred to see himself as part of a much longer tradition of British painting, comparing his use of white dots in his dioramas to that of John Constable in his landscapes.
Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020
Credit Line: Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie
© Estate of the Artist