Stephen Dean is a New York City based artist whose work celebrates the relationship between saturated color, transparency and light through the use of mediums such as watercolor, dichroic glass and projected films of infrared camera feeds. In his large-scale video installations, works on paper, and sculptures, Dean combines an ethnographic approach, using a precise sampling of objects and rituals, with an uncanny sense of poetic exploration and restless observation. In his films and mixed media works, Dean reconfigures the aesthetic qualities of everyday forms to highlight unexpected structures and patterns of color. Playing with sequences, variation and repetition, his recent works such as the crossword puzzles series which are composed of close to 100,000 dots of watercolor playing against the printed pattern of black squares serve as a vehicle for meditating upon everyday cultural practices.
Stephen Dean (b.1968, France) lives and works in New York, and has exhibited extensively in the US and Europe including the Los Angeles County Museum (2014), the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2012); the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris (2011), the Tinguely Museum, Basel (2010), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2007); the Miami Art Museum (2006); and many additional venues.
Dean's work has also been exhibited in several Biennials: Moscow (2009), Site SantaFe (2006), Venice (2005), Istanbul (2003) and Whitney (2002). His work is in many collections including: the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; among others.