Square Biopsy

Gabrielle Marie Stone is a Chicago-based contemporary abstract painter. Drawing inspiration from Post-Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist works, Stone's pieces play with figures, objects, and masses, playfully combining the medium's historical attempt to represent pictorial scenes with its authentic material quality. Using paint to sculpt space rather than to depict a system of designs, Stone welcomes the viewer into a three-dimensional space, and then promptly revokes the invitation.

It’s through this retraction that Stone turns the viewer into a bird, of sorts, and the painting into a closed window. This also exposes a series of contradictions — depth vs surface. Illusion vs honesty. Representation vs abstraction. Age vs newness. Are we really seeing what’s there? Are we trying too hard to make something out of something else? Stone compares her paintings to clouds; do we actually see something in them, or is it just the air?

Stone studied Studio Art at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She went on to work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and several galleries in Chicago. Her paintings are in private collections across the United States.