Serena Stevens was born in 1988 in Fort Madison, Iowa. After spending six years living in Southern California, New Mexico and then New England, Stevens returned to Iowa to paint the distance between past and present and the discomfort of familiarity. Her project of self- reflection marks the changes in her own perspective after her departure from and return to her home.
The paintings of Clover & 4th are not depictions of an intersection, rather a collection of places that converge. Her paintings index her efforts to see anew her personal and private spaces and surroundings. The tension, which arises from the nature of painting itself, resonates with Stevens’s own exploration of place, presence and belonging.About her debut show at Postmasters, Roberta Smith wrote “Serena Stevens’s New York gallery debut, combines Midwestern plainness with a slightly forlorn reverie. Her paintings follow suit, haunting everyday, mostly domestic, people-free scenes with strangeness — largely through her attention to light, paint texture and scale. Ms. Stevens is in the process of mastering a loose, somewhat photographic realism that may reflect an admiration for the paintings of Edward Hopper and Eric Fischl." New York Times 2020