BIO
Abbott Stillman started painting in the 1980s for an audience limited to family and friends. The artist was busy with a successful career in both real estate development and the leadership of a Silicon Valley company, but all the while maintained a studio practice that, over the course of decades, has produced a remarkable depth and breadth of work. It was only in late 2023 that he first exhibited publicly. If there is a through line to his collected paintings, which consist of abstract work interrupted on occasion by figurative pieces, it consists of some combination of exuberance, balance, and harmony all in service to his core beliefs that revolve around an optimistic view born of a focus on the far horizon and an obligation to, and the opportunity to, repair a fractured world.
A majority of his paintings are compositions of rich color, often in abstracted grounds and spaces that evoke deep emotional responses. Stillman's work follows multiple paths. He tends to start exploring one path and then relatively quickly move on to another, sometimes returning to those he has previously travelled months or years later. The variety demonstrated within any given year can be daunting. But sometimes motives and causes are just very simple. Stillman himself says it best: “In the end, the essence of my process is that I let the paint and the canvas tell me what to paint. When I’m doing my best work, it feels like it’s coming through me, instead of from me.”
Stillman attended the M.I.T School of Architecture and Planning as a Mellon Fellow. His attraction to a "creator's" education can be traced all the way back to the many trips his mother initiated during his childhood to MoMA and the Met, as a result of which he almost accidentally developed a “painterly” eye and a deep appreciation for the courage of an artist who conjures something out of unbridled imagination. After graduating from M.I.T, he built an award-winning and highly respected real estate career– in good part because of his deep understanding of the creative process and his close collaborations with the designers of every building he conceived and constructed. Among the notable properties he developed is Three Lincoln Center, a 1,000,000 square foot mixed-use building that constitutes the northwest corner of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (NYC). Another is a 360,000 square foot office building a few blocks from the White House, leading to his first public artwork that he thought of as a gift to the community and a way of distinguishing his property: LowRez/HiFi, which was conceived and then collaborated on with architects, musicians and LED designers. The artwork combined a sound-and-light grove and LED-based kinetic building signage. It was selected by the Cooper Hewitt Museum for their 2007 Triennial, and subsequently displayed at The Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston.
Since first exhibiting his work in 2023 Stillman's paintings have become part of many institutional and private collections.