Bob Stanley American, 1932-1997

Bob Stanley (b. 1932 – d. 1997 New York, United States), an American painter whose gritty works on canvas adapted commercial imagery and newspaper photographs, had his first solo show at Paul Bianchini in 1965 and has exhibited regularly in New York City and Europe ever since. Stanley first worked in collage before he began to base his paintings on images clipped from newspapers and magazines, following the example of Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, in the early 1960’s. 

Enlarged and often done in two saturated colours, Stanley’s paintings balanced between the abstract and the powerfully explicit. His subjects included musicians, sporting events and pornography. In the late 1960’s Stanley started using his own photographs, basing paintings on images of tree branches or life-drawing models at New York’s School of Visual Arts, where he taught for 16 years.

Stanley’s work is represented in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan; the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the Milwaukee Art Museum.