Opening Reception: Thursday, February 13th, 6-8pm

February 13th - March 15th, 2025

Auxier Kline is pleased to present Abstracted Vistas: Stephen Gay & Benjamin Staker.  

Abstrated Vistas consists of a suite of new paintings created by the artists Stephen Gay and Benjamin Staker over the past year that straddle the line between traditional Landscape painting and Abstraction.  

These two artists embed themselves in the various landscapes they inhabit; the rolling hill of Ireland where both artists have spent time painting, New York City’s public parks, the forests outside the city limits, the Rocky Mountains in Bozeman Montana, where Stephen Gay recently relocated after leaving New York last year. In these various locals, both of these painters create gestural and intuitive paintings of how the landscapes feel to them emotionally.  They interrupt these diverse locals, and their personal experiences in them, using shape, color and form to create compositions that evoke emotional and intangible reflections of the natural world.

Stephen Gay and Benjamin Staker are both recent MFA graduates of the New York Academy of Art, located in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City.  

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Stephen Gay (b. 1993, USA) is a painter living and working in Bozeman, MT. After graduating with a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he was awarded a Fulbright Student grant. He earned his MFA at the New York Academy of Art where he received the Shiela Ball and Randall Burkert Patron Scholar’s Award and two Academy Scholar Awards. His work has been exhibited in New York, Charlotte, and West Palm Beach, and Ireland. He has recently completed a residency at Kylemore Notre Dame Global Centre in Ireland

Benjamin Staker (b. 1994, Washington) is a painter living in New York, NY. He received his BA in art history and interdisciplinary visual arts at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2015. In 2024, he completed his MFA from the New York Academy of Art where he was awarded the 2025 Chubb Fellowship. Staker has also been selected for residencies at Byrdcliffe in Woodstock (June 2024) and the Kylemore Notre Dame Global Centre in Ireland (July 2024). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Ethan Cohen Gallery and George Adams Gallery.