Abstract painter, printmaker Gary Stephan was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied in New York at the Art Students League, Parsons and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, before receiving his MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute.

The artist has gone through a number of styles based on the influences of the moment. In California in the 1960s, he was influenced by the California figurative style of Richard Diebenkorn and others. In the 1970s, influenced by Jasper Johns, he became an experimental abstractionist, exploring a variety of media and materials. He currently paints brightly colored geometric abstractions, while making prints of ribbon-like swirls.

Stephan has taught at the School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union in New York City, and has been a visiting artist at the Rhode Island School of Design, San Francisco and Maryland Art Institutes, and universities like Yale, Brown, Columbia and Cornell.

He has shown his work nationally and internationally at the Mary Boone, Hirschl & Adler Modern, and Marlborough galleries in New York City, Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, D.C., and galleries in Paris, Barcelona and Italy.

Gary Stephan's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and the Rockefeller Collection.