There’s No One Else Here
Stefan Hoza
10.24 — 11.16
In his solo exhibition There’s No One Else Here, Stefan Hoza presents compositions of duetting figures whose disproportionate scale and variant stylization exist in psychologically dense atmospheres. While punctuated by familiar domestic objects like blankets, lamps, and pillows, the spaces constructed within Hoza’s paintings evade concrete definition. Each of the depicted figurations is tethered to their placelessness between the edges of the canvas.
In previous bodies of work, Hoza portrayed interior scenes that dwelled on the warmth of his homelife. The artist’s partner and cats became motifs, transforming into signifiers of domesticity and its inherent complications. While Hoza has shed the representational familiarities of the everyday, themes of banality, longing, and loneliness have remained steadfast. These undercurrents form the connective tissue across the bodies of Hoza’s world. In his new paintings, Hoza wrestles with the isolation that often accompanies a rigorous studio practice. The figurative couples on display become surrogate companions, a simulacrum family quietly arguing about their own interiority.
For these new paintings, Hoza abandons the security of autobiography to chart ulterior territory, becoming a narrator of unknown intent. Sinisterly inventive faces marred by harsh angles of thick paint grin off the surfaces with an aggression and urgency absent from previously heartfelt scenes. A once pervasive comforting glow is now compartmentalized, offering only moments of reprieve in the anxiety of obsessively honed brushwork. Hoza’s figural counterparts steadily buzz with an underlying drone of doubt, conflating personal grievances with the burden of participating in an overabundant history. Interactions are dictated by the paradigm of contrasting sizes and gestures of each character. Across several works, figures point flatly in opposition to the amorphous faces peering at them from behind. Perhaps beckoning to an unseen force lying outside the confines of the canvas or asserting themselves to expel their fearfully large companions, each of these narratives becomes intently subjective and associative.
As a painter, Hoza freely flows through the streams of historical painting, drawing his language from the lexicon of twentieth-century representational painting. Through finely tuned colors and sweeping passages of alluringly foggy light, Hoza carves his own idol to domesticated existentialism. Pointing to the past through sly compositional references to Dickenson, Vallotton, and Vuillard, Hoza flattens painting’s canonical timeline, underscoring the persistence of life’s turmoils, fears, and doubts. Within his practice, the artist lives in the intricately orchestrated conveyance of these relationships and ideas through his inherited formalism. Shapes and colors are measured and remeasured through diligent contemplations of paint, the culmination of which subverts the whole and offers the viewer a prevailing sense of grief and guilt.
– Phillip Hinge
Stefan Hoza (b. 1988, Columbus, Ohio) is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art & Design in 2011 and attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School for Music and Art in 2010. Hoza has exhibited at Secret Recipe Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Arturo Bandini Art Fair, Los Angeles, CA; Page Gallery, New York, NY; Step Sister, New York, NY; Restaurant Projects, New York, NY; and Lubov Gallery, New York, NY. His solo exhibitions include Anonymous Gallery, New York, NY, 2021; and Catbox Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY, 2023. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.