source: stia

Julian Stanczak’s vibrant paintings were first shown in New York City in 1964. Playing off the term ‘Pop Art’, his New York gallery dealer thought that the title “Optical Paintings” might be ‘catchy’ and it was. Quickly shortened to “Op”, it became the name of a new international movement celebrated in 1965 with the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, The Responsive Eye. Although the term was objectionable to Stanczak and Albers, his professor, this exhibition launched Stanczak’s career. From the beginning, Stanczak was recognized as one of Op Art’s outstanding artists. The international context was an extension of early modernism’s belief that abstraction, or non-representational art, was capable of sidestepping language, and communicating across cultural boundaries on a non-verbal level, since geometry and mathematics were systems understood around the world. Almost overnight, op art became the popular movement of the day.
Stanczak was born in Poland in 1928. He immigrated to the United States in the early 1950’s, received his BA in 1954 from the Cleveland Institute of Art, received his MA from Yale University in 1956, returned to Ohio to teach at the Art Academy of Cincinnati until 1964. He taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art until he retired in 1995. He has exhibited since 1961, and is represented in the collections of more than 60 museums.