Art by Eric Stefanski

Stefanski is a Chicago-based painter, born 1987, who earned an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2015. His paintings pull directly from graffiti, mixing bold, spray-can-adjacent color fields with blunt, sometimes deliberately crude text lifted straight into the composition rather than treated as a caption. It's an aesthetic built to read fast and land hard, closer to a tag than a traditional painted surface.

He's shown solo work in Chicago, Boston, Tokyo, and Madrid, and is represented by Escat Gallery among others. Alongside the studio practice, he also teaches the humanities, a combination that doesn't show up much in how his paintings actually look, loud, immediate, unconcerned with subtlety, but seems to sit comfortably alongside it for him.