Lewis Stein

[7] Artforum’s critic determined that Stein’s object pieces, “isolated and stripped of their abilities to punish, regulate or restrict,” offered “a kind of realism predicated on the physiological response to stimulus—a rare opportunity to be intimate with a set of specific spatial relationships that govern conduct.”.

[8] Frieze Magazine's reviewer, Josephine Graf, appraised the show as making “a compelling argument for revisiting Stein’s oeuvre.

Stein separates the readymade from its Duchampian irony, revealing instead how everyday objects can guide visibility and delimit movement in a subtle and concise form of policing.”[9] Evaluating the same exhibit, Art Review scribe Jeppe Ugelvig opined that “Lewis spatialized and readymades are--like most derivatives of ‘hostile’ and ‘regulatory’ architectures—seductive in their violence, and their position as deeply antagonistic in particular, to the idealist project of Minimalism and its pursuit of perceptual objectivity.”[10] A thread that ran through much of Stein’s work was the effect of perceptual structures upon human experiences.

[13] For a 1990 exhibit at the Paula Allen Gallery consisting of photographs of mirrors from the pages of mail order catalogs blown-up to life size, Artforum reviewer John Miller felt a sense of “a creeping shoddiness overriding the too-familiar elegance this hybridization typically yields and relies upon.” Instead of evoking glamour or polish, the "specific of mail order furnishings does not exactly conjure up visions of luxury,” Miller concluded.

[14] Likening a series of Stein's photographs of chandeliers to “switched-on May Ray,” the New Yorker declared that “A single idea--that light is photogenic--goes quite far.” [10] The Village Voice described the same show as “big, dumb, black-and-white pictures of electric chandeliers glowing out of pitch black space [that] “fill the gallery with a cold, postmod light.”[15] Like other artists who were shaped by the ferment of the 1960s.