Op Art Eye Candy

I’m lucky that I get to live with a Julian Stanczak painting, bought by my father-in-law in 1968, when Op Art was really something. I saw a show on Stanczak in Chelsea a few years ago, and was blown away that he is still producing Op Art Out of Ohio. Now the D. Wigmore Gallery is having a show on Stanczak, his better-known Yale Art School classmate Richard Anuskiewicz, and several others from the Ohio school.

I love that Stanczak, at least in the 1960s, rarely reverted to the box-in-box motif popularized in airports by Victor Vasarely. His pictures were landscapes, albeit landscapes of shimmering shapes. The Times reviewed it today, and it seems well worth seeing, even if just for contrast, in a season when people are talking about Rothko’s reds and Johns’s stripes.

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By Alexandra Lange

Alexandra Lange is an architecture critic and author, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner for Criticism, awarded for her work as a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab. She is currently the architecture critic for Curbed and has written extensively for Design Observer, Architect, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. Lange holds a PhD in 20th-century architecture history from New York University. Her writing often explores the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and design, with a focus on how the built environment shapes everyday life. She is also a recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from AIGA, an honor she shares with Design Observer’s Editor-in-Chief, Ellen McGirt.