Stanley Casselman

Casselman was born in 1963 in Phoenix, Arizona. He studied at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1985, with a study year in 1984 at Richmond College in London. He began in sculpture and ceramics before moving into painting, developing a signature process of pulling acrylic paint across polyester and polyscreen surfaces with custom-built squeegees to produce dense, textured abstractions.

His wider recognition followed a well documented episode in which he responded to Jerry Saltz's New York Magazine call testing whether an unknown painter could produce work in the manner of Gerhard Richter for a fraction of Richter's prices; Saltz wrote about the resulting work, and Casselman later developed it into the Inhaling Richter series, shown as Red Tape with artist Hyo Myoung Kim at Gazelli Art House in London in 2014. He has since shown internationally, including Labyrinths of Light at Gazelli Art House's Baku space in 2019 and 15 Degrees of Entropy at Lowell Ryan Projects in Los Angeles in 2021. He lives and works in the New York area, with a studio reported in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is currently represented by AP Space Contemporary Art Gallery, and presented a new solo exhibition, The Beauty of Not Knowing, at Nicolas Auvray Gallery in New York in 2026.

Casselman has not been the subject of major named art prizes in the available record; his critical standing instead rests on curatorial selection and institutional placement. Guggenheim Museum curator Joan Young selected his work for the 2011 group exhibition The International Show at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and in 2015 Sotheby's S|2 in New York placed him in Icons: The Art of Appropriation, situating his Richter related project within a broader appropriation art lineage. The recurring critical thread is a fascination with how closely, and to what end, an artist can approach another artist's method, first through the Richter project and later through his light and pattern based series.

The highest auction price for Casselman that can be verified against a specific documented sale is USD 30,000, paid for a large original painting listed as "Large Stanley Casselman Painting, Original Work" at Modern Auctions on 25 November 2017 (Lot 312); the exact sale location could not be confirmed from available sources. Other confirmed public results are smaller: a work titled Luminor sold for USD 12,500 (estimate USD 12,000 to 18,000) at Doyle, and rapture #27 sold for EUR 3,000 at the Austrian house Ressler Kunst Auktionen. Lots have also appeared at Phillips and Heritage Auctions, but their realized prices could not be confirmed from available sources, and aggregator data from Artsy places his broader auction results in a range up to roughly USD 50,000, so a higher, currently unverified sale may exist. Taken together, these results describe a market that is real but small in volume and dispersed across secondary and regional venues rather than concentrated at major auction houses, so the 2017 figure should be read as the highest confirmed price found rather than a certain all-time record.

Casselman's market is genuinely thin: the confirmed auction record sits at USD 30,000 from a 2017 regional sale, and most other public results are far smaller, so pricing history offers limited guidance on where a given work should land. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and studio or gallery verification carry more weight than they would for an artist with a fuller documentary record. His work has been described as exhibited at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tampa Museum of Art, but the dossier supporting this profile could confirm those as exhibition venues rather than as documented permanent collection holdings, a distinction collectors should keep in mind when weighing institutional support.