Geoffrey Stein

New York City, New York

Geoffrey Stein is a figurative painter and mixed media collage artist, most recently focusing on portraiture.

Geoffrey Stein is a recovering lawyer, who after a misspent youth as a reinsurance litigator has been painting full-time since 2000. He received a Certificate in painting from the New York Studio School in 2004, and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2007. He has shown throughout the United States and in London, Dublin, Paris, and Reykjavik. Stein lives and paints in New York City and Westport, Connecticut.

When painting, Stein savors the slips of the hand that express one’s unconscious feelings about the subject. In collage, he loves the randomness — the snippets of text and photographs appearing and disappearing that become the subject's likeness.

Stein is interested in the conversation between abstraction and realism. He does not want to make an academic copy of the model or a photo realistic illustration. Rather, his work explores the tension of what needs to be shown and what does not, the seen and the unseen.

"I make art to find out what I think about the world; to discover the things I do not have words for."