Anne Hayden Stevens

September 4 - October 11, 2025

Slip House is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Chicago-based painter Anne Hayden Stevens (b. 1967). Working among histories of abstract painting, landscape, and narrative, Stevens constructs a tensile weave of atmosphere and structure. The exhibition marks Stevens’ solo debut in New York, on view from September 4 through October 11, 2025.

On the first floor, saturated haze swells in cadmium, cobalt, and pink around tiny protagonists entering a forest pass, or open sea. Each figure journeys inwards, mirroring the eye’s formal path around the picture plane. Gauzy expanses are tempered by shaded corners that return the focus back to center. Thin borders distill and repeat color and motif in delicate counterpoint. These edges do more than contain—they present a double horizon, a simultaneous reflection and rebellion against the illusion of receding space, where the picture’s edge becomes a threshold rather than a limit.

The play between material flatness and representational depth is germane to the mythic origins of Western modernism: the supposed liberation of color and line from representation. Unlike the explosive force of Fauves and Cubists, or the masculine autonomy of Color Field and Abstract Expressionism, Stevens takes a cue from the experience of seeing the world from afar. The leafy crown of a treetop, for example, loses its complex volume, reduced to a silhouette or swath of color. Visual simplification is automatic, and the sacrifice of fine detail to broad suggestion is an embodied source for Stevens’ interest in landscape and abstraction.

This dynamic between intimate and vast scale also recalls Chinese landscape painting, another key point of reference. The desire to absorb a thousand miles in a single glance, while still capturing acute geological detail, weaves together atmosphere and elaborate structure. The landscape tradition also integrates narrative into topography. Wanderers guide the eye and project moods of contemplation and ascetic escape.

The second floor explores the interiority of Stevens’ favored guides and travelers. Solitude is experienced here without loneliness. The philosopher, for example, stops to nurse, and her universe bends to expand around her. The responsibility of loving and the ties of motherhood are respiratory, rather than sentimental. Stevens’ emotional geography seeks an alternative to self-portraiture that prioritizes the likeness or body. Introspective blue accompanies a separation, or reunion, in a valley. In the climb up a mountainside, affective charge is spread across effervescent reds and looming purples.

Upstairs, oil works on paper allow balanced layers of rock and foliage to bend into feeling. High chroma melts into pastel, and notational speed opens new possibilities. An ochre huddle collapses concentrated compositional weight, freeing room for gestural fog. Close-cropped celadon boulders read as both rock and cloud. The architectural reveal and the woodland clearing loosen visual stability. Downstairs, Stevens’s tight language of measured expanse is annotated by shifting details, and a wind seems to whistle through pass, valley, and field.

– Emeline Boehringer

Anne Hayden Stevens (b. 1967) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Stevens earned an MA in Visual Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from California College of the Arts. Prior to coming to Illinois, she lived and worked in Seattle, where she taught drawing & digital media at the University of Washington. Her practice ranges across painting, drawing, artist’s books and public art. Her work has been exhibited nationally including at Slip House, NY; the Rockford Museum, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, IL; Bellevue Art Museum, WA; among others. Her work can be found in public collections such as UC Berkeley, CA; Wellesley College, MA; Scripps College, CA; Harvard Houghton Library, MA, Columbia University Butler Library, NY, among others. Her upcoming exhibition at Slip House opening September 2025 marks her debut solo in New York.