Steven Charles

 Steven Charles has sustained a rigorous, process-driven painting practice for several decades, one that resists planning, illustration, and fixed meaning. Beginning each work without sketches or compositional goals, Charles allows the painting to emerge through a sequence of intuitive actions and sustained revision. Early marks—whether poured, splashed, or otherwise directly applied—become the ground for an extended process of reworking in which forms are repeatedly filled, reduced, and transformed.

Charles refers to this recursive method as “targeting,” a procedure through which shapes are progressively narrowed until only traces of earlier decisions remain. Over time, each painting generates a logic unique to its own composition, revealing relationships that are discovered through making rather than imposed in advance. Although the artist’s hand is evident throughout, the finished works resist expressive finality, operating instead as sites of ongoing inquiry.

The paintings demand prolonged attention. Dense passages of detail encountered up close often recede into atmospheric fields when viewed at a distance, producing a continual shift between precision and dissolution. In this oscillation, perception itself becomes central: the work is less about image than about duration, focus, and the limits of visual comprehension.

This exhibition represents Charles’s second solo presentation with Marcia Wood Gallery and reflects a continued commitment to painting as a space of uncertainty, optimism, and sustained engagement—where meaning remains provisional and each work stands as a record of its own becoming.

Steven Charles (b. 1967, Birkenhead, England) received his BFA from the University of North Texas and his MFA from Temple University in Rome, Italy. He lives and works in Dallas, Texas.

Charles has exhibited widely in the United States, with solo presentations at institutions and galleries in New York, Brooklyn, and Dallas, including Marlborough Chelsea, Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe, Pierogi Gallery, and Stux Gallery. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Vice.

He is a recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.