Stephen Hansen

Stephen Hansen is a New Mexico sculptor known for witty, meticulously crafted paper mache sculptures that blend painting and wall sculpture. Born in Seattle in 1950 and self-taught, he began his career in 1968 and moved to New Mexico in 1984. His work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Federal Reserve, and U.S. embassies in Italy and Venezuela, and he received New Mexico's Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2009. He has had retrospectives at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Museum of New Mexico's Governor's Gallery, and the Las Cruces Museum of Art.

Hansen calls himself less an explorer of the human condition than "a hapless tourist," and his figures walk the line between lifelike and caricature. His "Great Moments in Art" series, begun in 2014, imagines great painters like Rothko and Cézanne as laborers, literally rolling on the color. Alongside paper mache, he works in resin, hydrocal, wood, bronze, steel, and stone. Studio E Gallery in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, represents Stephen Hansen.