In her most recent work, Stephanie Temma Hier explores the porous boundary between painting and sculpture, allowing painted images and ceramic structures to converse in hybrid compositions that challenge the flatness of the picture plane. Swan Song unfolds as a unified journey, in which frames, domestic objects, and recurring figures collaborate to construct an imaginary space suspended between the everyday and the uncanny. Through a practice that intertwines different temporalities – the immediacy of painting and the irreversible slowness of ceramics – the exhibition reflects on themes of transformation, consumption and the passage of time, evoking an ending that does not signify closure, but rather opens the door to new narrative and formal possibilities.
Stephanie Temma Hier, “Swan Song”, installation view at Anton Kern Gallery, photo by Izzy Leung, courtesy Stephanie Temma Hier and Anton Kern Gallery
Margherita Artoni: In Swan Song, your frames don’t just surround the paintings, they actually shape how they come to life. How does this shift change the way you see painting as its own space?
Stephanie Temma Hier: I like to think of my work in a holistic way. For me, the boundaries between painting and sculpture have completely blurred and they feel well integrated. Even when moments of tension, both in materials and subject matter, emerge in my work, I feel that the painting becomes charged by the frame, and likewise the sculpture becomes a conduit for conversation with the subject matter. Marrying these disparate materials together creates a third thing, which is what excites me most. They almost vibrate off one another! It’s difficult for me to imagine my paintings existing without their sculptural counterpart. As I work on them in the studio, before they are fully assembled, the paintings feel almost naked before they get affixed into the ceramic.
Stephanie Temma Hier, “Something Sweet for Afterwards I”; “Something Sweet for Afterwards II”; “Something Sweet for Afterwards III”, 2025, oil on linen with glazed stoneware sculpture, each: 12 3/4 x 18 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches, (32.4 x 46.4 x 8.9 cm), photo by New Document, courtesy Stephanie Temma Hier and Anton Kern Gallery
Ceramics have their own rhythm: waiting, firing, and irreversible changes. How does this slow, patient temporality interact with the immediacy of painting?
The slow temporality of ceramic and more immediate process of painting are actually quite complimentary and make for a beautiful rhythm in the studio. While I wait for sculptures to dry or fire, I can shift to working in paint. If I need space to contemplate a piece, or experiment with a new ceramic glaze I know that there are endless other tasks in both mediums that can occupy my time and energy. As I work on so many pieces simultaneously, a rhythm of creation emerges, forging a real interconnectedness between my whole body of work, so the different temporalities of both mediums end up working for me.
Your work constantly balances between two and three dimensions, never fully resolving. Is this tension something you see as central to your practice?
Absolutely! We are all constantly navigating life in two dimensions, online and in print as well as our full three dimensional lives. So, it feels quite apt that I navigate this tension in my work as well. I want my works to feel both connected to our daily experiences and take on an uncanny or surreal atmosphere.
Stephanie Temma Hier, “Something Sweet for Afterwards II”, 2025 (detail), oil on linen with glazed stoneware sculpture, each: 12 3/4 x 18 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches (32.4 x 46.4 x 8.9 cm), photo by New Document, courtesy Stephanie Temma Hier and Anton Kern Gallery
The swan appears throughout the show, but it never fully settles. Do you think of it as an archetypal image, or more as a device that organizes how the exhibition is experienced?
In a sense, both. The swan imagery grew very naturally through the creation of the exhibition and became a kind of symbolic anchor. I created the piece She has good bones first and felt invigorated by the power of the swan symbol and its connection to art history and mythology, so rife with meaning across cultures. As new works began to be developed, the swan felt like a perfect archetypal image to convey a specific feeling. I wanted to use the symbols as a metaphor for transformation and so even in works where the swan doesn’t appear directly, I hope that they carry a similar valence and emotional resonance. Similarly with the title of the exhibition, a Swan Song is often a triumphant death or final act, yet in this exhibition the Swan Song points to a new beginning, a quiet culmination that points to new possibilities and gestures towards something unseen and unsayable.
Many of the domestic objects in Swan Song lose their usual function, yet they aren’t just symbols. How do you think about the relationship between function, meaning, and form?
I often depict functional objects that are rendered functionless and strange. I like to take the quotidian items of our daily lives, chairs, shoes, dinner plates, clothing etc. and freeze them in time. We all have very intimate and personal relationships with the items we surround ourselves with and fill our homes with, even if we aren’t cognizant of it. And many of these objects that we take for granted have wonderful sculptural forms that are endlessly fun to play with. When I recontexualize these objects, alter them with glaze and marry them with sometimes contrastive images, something new and unexpected arises in this new relationship, which can prompt an uncanniness akin to dream logic. I’m fascinated by how our psyches attach importance and meaning to objects and images, often mass produced ones. As I meticulously sculpt or paint these objects, I enter a meditative or trancelike state which, like a word that’s repeated ad nauseam until it loses its meaning, allows for the work to become something both familiar and completely new.
Stephanie Temma Hier, “She has good bones“, 2025, oil on linen with glazed stoneware sculpture, 42 x 23 x 24 inches (106.7 x 58.4 x 61 cm); “We slept with the lights on“, 2025, oil on linen with glazed stoneware sculpture, 26 x 20 x 6 inches (66 x 50.8 x 15.2 cm), courtesy Stephanie Temma Hier and Anton Kern Gallery
In works like Something Sweet for Afterwards 1–3, traces of consumption remain. How does time itself become a material in your work, alongside paint or ceramic?
I’m heavily inspired by film, so I wanted to create a three part work that felt like film stills or animation cels referencing the passage of time. Themes of consumption are central to my work so in Something sweet for afterwards 1-3 we see a plate of desserts eaten by an absent or imagined figure. The paintings within the placemat frames depict an inversion in subject matter, with flowers slowly blooming as the food disappears, pointing to how the rhythm of growth and decay are in a constant harmony with each other. It’s basically a triptych time-lapse of flourishing and decay, of birth and death. But with cake!
Swan Song hints at an ending, but more as transformation than closure. How does this exhibition reshape the directions you see for your future work?
Swan Song is a defining moment in my work. There’s a subtly irony that the show’s title hints at a grand finale yet I’m really in a moment of new beginnings! There’s a sense of narrative poetry achieved in this exhibition which I intend to carry forward. The path of my future work remains unchartered as I let my intuition and psychological exploration guide my artistic choices. However, there’s doubtless much much more to come.
Margherita Artoni
Info:
Stephanie Temma Hier. Swan Song
14/01/2026 – 21/02/2026
Anton Kern Gallery
16 East 55th Street – New York, NY 10022
www.antonkerngallery.com
Margherita Artoni is a contemporary art critic and curator working between Italy and the United States. She began collaborating with Flash Art and has written for Segno, Juliet, Artribune, Exibart, Inside Art, ArteIN, part of cult(ure), The Art Fuse, and Whitehot Magazine. She has directed galleries in Turin (NEOCHROME, EDGE ArtSpace) and New York (TEAM Gallery), and curated projects and exhibitions with international artists such as Rashid Johnson, Theaster Gates, Ali Banisadr, Angel Otero, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Laura Owens, and Mika Tajima. She has also curated projects for NADA New York and MIART.
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