ABOUT

Stephen D’Onofrio is a contemporary visual artist focused on painting. He received his BFA and MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and 2016, respectively. In 2018, D’Onofrio was a finalist for the prestigious Hopper Prize. He has exhibited extensively in venues across the country, including galleries in Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections including Fidelity Investments, Estée Lauder, and the Clements Collection at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. D’Onofrio has lived and worked in Philadelphia since being awarded an artist residency in the city at Jasper Studios in 2017. His work is represented in the United States by Galleri Urbane, Dallas.

The artist’s thematic image-making is broadly characterized by an interest in the home decor market, the mass commodification of art, and the generic visual language that accompanies commercial design. His paintings explore the relationship between physical spaces and the objects we fill them with. Often alluding to typical domestic decor and household ornaments, his canvases make these inherently empty objects into simplified symbols and patterns that can then be rearranged and compressed to carry a formal sensibility. The “Produce(d) Paintings” series serves as an historic exemplar of still-life painting that is as old as the medium itself.

Currently, D’Onofrio addresses the idea of painting as ornament, incorporating stock subjects of landscape, still life, and portraiture becoming knickknacks into his lexicon. The painter distills, consolidates, and appropriates the overwhelming amount of generic design aesthetic in the commercial decor market. Rather than fight the inherent kitschiness of this visual language, he embraces the imagery so his canvases can, in turn, become a critique of the subject it represents.