Surfside Memories: On Maxwell Stevens’ Soft Focus Beach Scenes
Maxwell Stevens is a New York City based artist renowned for his layered paintings and drawings which combine photorealistic imagery with vivid, energetic abstractions. In his recent exhibition Surfside, New Paintings at Onetwentyeight in New York, the beach is more than a place of leisure, it becomes a space where intimacy is revealed, even as physical proximity conceals emotional distance. It is also a site for fleeting memories and leisurely moments that disappear and yet linger in the mind long after summer’s end. These lingering moments are central to his Soft Focus Beach Scenes, a suite of abstract paintings within the overall series that take an expressionistic approach and distill the imagery of his meticulously detailed beach scenes into lush and vibrantly coloured gestural abstractions. The works embrace digital strategies by initially blurring his reference images onscreen and then further blurring and feathering the painted versions to the limits of recognizability. However, in these paintings, abstraction and figuration meld together as improvisational brushstrokes and vivid smears of paint are applied over the wet imagery, sometimes gliding across the images and in other turns blending into paint from the surfaces below, pushing and pulling scenery and overpainting together into new configurations. The result oscillates between figuration and abstraction, creating works of stunning visual beauty and sensuality that bring with them a sense of psychological unease.
Maxwell Stevens "Soft Focus Beach Scene (Weekenders)", Oil on Panel, 30.5 cm x 30.5 cm, 2024
Stevens’ unique artistic approach and recontextualization of painterly abstraction has garnered significant critical acclaim, drawing a wide array of associations including everything from waves, wind, desire and memory to ancient statuary, the effects of time, musical sampling, interference and violence. In a recent interview with Spanish cultural journal El Cuaderno (The Notebook) the artist stated, “In a way, the abstract painting has a metaphorical aspect to how it breaks across the skin, traverses across images, conceals and reveals, while embracing the incidental and arbitrary results of improvised action.” Soon after moving to New York City, after many years of working exclusively in non-representational abstraction, Stevens embarked on a significant stylistic shift in his approach to his art. He began composing his canvases with recognizable imagery, incorporating naturalistic figures and lifelike scenes into his paintings, and then abruptly overpainting these pictures directly with emotionally charged abstractions. These newer works are clearly identifiable by large abstract gestures superimposed directly on top of photorealist paintings that have become increasingly descriptive, each series correlating with the seasons, often around a deeply personal theme. Among these works are the artist’s Soft Focus Abstractions, noted for their diffuse light, luminous colours, and hard, mirror-like surfaces.
In Surfside, Stevens returns to the coastal setting of his Last Days of Summer series while probing more deeply into his subjects’ inner lives. Families, friends, and strangers share the beach, yet each seems absorbed in a private world. Pleasure and sensuality mingle with introspection, vulnerability, and the solitude of being alone in a crowd. This tension emerges in the interplay between meticulous figuration and gestural abstraction, which disrupts and transforms each scene. Drawing on photographs taken over several summers, Stevens balances his close attention to lighting, scenery and subtle gestures with the speed and risk of his painterly interventions, while brushstrokes, scrapes, and smears fragment recognizable forms, inviting the viewer’s imagination. Stevens’ interest in weathered ancient sculpture and frescoes further shapes his exploration of memory and the fragility of human presence.
Maxwell Stevens "Soft Focus Beach Scene (Pink Sky at Dusk)", Oil on Panel, 46 cm x 61 cm, 2024
In an exhibition review of Surfside, New Paintings for Juliet Art Magazine, Art Historian Andrea García Casal writes “Where photography fixes a fraction of a second, Stevens introduces sedimentation: observation, memory, layers, erasures, corrections, delays and accidents. Each painting retains something of the instant yet refuses to remain within it. The soft-focus works — Soft Focus Beach Scene (Pink Sky at Dusk), Soft Focus Beach Scene (Pink & Orange), Soft Focus Beach Scene (Sunbathers) and Soft Focus Beach Scene (Self Portrait with Orange Umbrella), all 2024 — take this operation to its limit. In these works, figurative information is thinned out until it is almost absorbed by chromatic experience. From a distance, one can still sense a horizon, a parasol, a figure, a band of sand or water; close up, the image becomes fluid, reflective and uncertain. It is not that the motif disappears altogether, but rather that it must be recovered by a gaze that can no longer rely upon immediate identification. The work turns perception into a conscious activity.” While pushing the expressive possibilities of abstraction and the capacity for art to lend fleeting moments a lasting permanence, this initiation of a perceptual delay is at the center of his painting practice.
Maxwell Stevens "Soft Focus Beach Scene (Sunbathers)", Oil on Panel, 30.5 cm x 30.5 cm, 2024
When viewers encounter these works, the paintings often appear almost entirely abstract. Presented within the overall series however, it becomes clear that many of the images correlate directly with specific scenes depicted in related works. Soft Focus Beach Scene (Pink Sky at Dusk corresponds closely to the highly detailed Pink Sky at Dusk for instance, however this version presents the scene as a memory on the precipice of being nearly forgotten. Likewise, Soft Focus Beach Scene (Sunbathers) at first glance presents splashes of cream yellows, dirty pinks and Prussian blues suspended over hazier hues before one begins to notice what appear to be two figures lounging before the open expanse of the ocean, with details of beach blankets, apparel and water bottles almost entirely obliterated. Soft Focus Beach Scene (Weekenders) presents just a portion of a corresponding composition from a related larger painting, with the barest minimum of flesh colours to indicate figures looming forward in the beachscape.
Maxwell Stevens "Soft Focus Beach Scene (Lifeguard)", Oil on Panel, 30.5 cm x 30.5 cm, 2024
In an arena of pure abstraction that Stevens often refers to as eliciting “Rorschach-like” personal interpretations that can change entirely with each viewer, his recontextualizing abstraction redirects our imaginative processes only partially, still leaving a significant amount of meaning to be interpreted and determined by the audience themselves. Wherein the detailed paintings in this series present naturalistic beach scenes with descriptive clarity, the soft focus works meld this scenery almost entirely into pure sensations of colour, surface and emotion, shifting the viewer’s perspective from observed reality to an experience of vivid yet fleeting memories.
Maxwell Stevens "Soft Focus Beach Scene (Sunbather by Rocks)", Oil on Panel, 30.5 cm x 30.5 cm, 2024
“This transition culminates in the Soft Focus Beach Scene works, where the experience of the beach dissolves almost entirely into the artist’s personal impressions. Figurative scenes gradually lose their contours, giving way to saturated colour, free impasto brushstrokes, and the materiality of paint, through which his experience of this place emerges more strongly. We can no longer clearly discern what is happening, yet perhaps here we come closest to the heart of these paintings: not the beach’s outward appearance so much as the sensation of being there.” (Angie Afifi, Fragments of a Summer Day: Reflections on Maxwell Stevens’ “Surfside” New Paintings, USA Art News)
As a coherent selection of works on their own, the Soft Focus Beach Scenes eventually reveal themselves as the populated coastal vistas that formulate the entire Surfside series. The impression of being at the beach is as strongly evoked by the materiality of each image as it is by their atmospheric mood and colouristic organisation. The paintings’ glassy surfaces are highly reflective, and their watery configurations appear still wet when hanging on the wall, accentuating their relationship to the ocean and beaches of the North Atlantic coast. Subtle traces of gestures, brushwork, smears, scrapes, and tool marks remain integral to each image. Together, they create a diffuse focus making the scenes feel like mirages, recognizable yet elusive, leaving a lasting sensation of summertime spent immersed at the beach.
Maxwell Stevens was born in Charleston, South Carolina (USA) in 1971. He received an MFA in Painting from the School of Art at Washington University in Saint Louis in 1995, and a BFA in Painting from The Atlanta College of Art (now SCAD Atlanta) in 1993. He has exhibited extensively and internationally in contemporary venues from Tokyo to London to New York, alongside major artists such as Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys, and Dorothea Rockburne. Recent exhibitions include Onetwentyeight, New York (2026, 2023) Galerie Bruno Massa, Paris, Tbilisi (2026, 2025, 2024), Galleria Tilde, Palermo, Italy (2026, 2025, 2024), Berry Campbell Gallery, New York (2026), A Space Gallery, New York (2026), Artmetod, New York (2026), Art Fair Daegu, South Korea (2026), BAMA Art Fair, Busan, South Korea (2026), Blue Art Fair, Busan, South Korea (2026), In-Between Ibiza (2026), Pink Art Fair, Seoul, South Korea (2026, 2025), Daegu International Art Fair, South Korea (2025), Palazzo Pisani Revedin, Venice, Italy (2025), (un)fair Milan, Italy (2024), Marbella Design & Art, Spain (2024), Amos Eno Gallery, New York (2024), D Contemporary, London (2024), and VillageOneArt, New York (2023). His work has been featured in numerous publications including Art in America, Art Collector News, Cultbytes, Juliet Art Magazine, The Museum of Modern Art Contemporary Drawing and Print Associates Bulletin, Arte Fuse, Art News USA, Aatonau, Contemporary Art Explore, Fine Arts News, Fine Art Connoisseur, HENI News, Meer Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Two Coats of Paint, and Art Papers.
Maxwell Stevens “Surfside” New Paintings
September 1 – October 11, 2026
Onetwentyeight, New York, NY
