February 28 — April 4, 2026
Selected Works on Paper
Stephen Lapthisophon
Conduit Gallery is honored to present Selected Works on Paper: 2003 - 2020, a survey of drawings by Dallas-based artist, Stephen Lapthisophon.
Spanning works on paper created between 2003 and 2020, the exhibition brings together a concentrated survey of Stephen Lapthisophon’s sustained and rigorous studio practice.
The works reveal the continuity of Lapthisophon’s visual language across nearly two decades. His mixed-media compositions operate as poetic improvisations, drawing from deeply embedded literary references, music, poetry and the legacy of twentieth-century art. Rather than quoting directly, the works absorb and reconfigure these influences, allowing fragments of cultural memory to surface and dissolve within layered fields of mark and material.
Materiality is central to Lapthisophon’s practice. Through the use of unconventional mediums—pigmented animal fats, spices, dirt, coffee grounds—Lapthisophon elevates the “stuff of everyday life”, echoing theItalian Arte Povera artists of the 1960s and 70s. These materials carry their own histories, scents. and temporal associations, transforming the surface into a site of accumulation. In doing so, Lapthisophon resists immediacy. His works ask the viewer to slow down, to look longer, and to engage with meanings that are neither fixed nor easily accessible.
Stephen Lapthisophon (b. 1956) is an American artist, writer, and educator working in the field of conceptual art, critical theory, and disability studies. Lapthisophon earned his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979, continuing his studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in the Department of Comparative Literature and Theory from 1986-1989. His early work combined poetry, performance, sound art, and visual arts with postmodern philosophical concerns. Influences include Arte Povera, Robert Smithson and the legacy of the Situationists, who sought to make everyday life a focus of artistic activity.
In 1994, Lapthisophon became legally blind after a neurological malady caused major deterioration of his vision. His subsequent work as an installation artist and art theorist has been profoundly shaped by this experience. In his most recent work, Lapthisophon incorporates everyday objects and found material such as string, cloth, leaves, egg shells, coffee, cinnamon, and saffron to break down barriers between art and daily life. His work challenges ideas of permanence and process, exalting the everyday while attempting to slow time and unpack hard-to-find meanings and forgotten histories.
During his twenty-year teaching tenure at the Universities of Texas Arlington and Dallas, Lapthisophon became a vital force within the Dallas–Fort Worth arts community, serving as a mentor and cultural advocate whose curatorial work helped shape the region's contemporary art discourse. He was a curator and advisor for the Dallas Biennial (2012, 2014, 2020) and organized exhibitions at Conduit Gallery (2016) and 500 Singleton (2011, 2015, 2016).
He has exhibited extensively across the United States as well as internationally in exhibitions in Germany, Spain, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. Selected museum exhibitions include the Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Museo de la Ciudad Queretaro, Mexico. He lives and works in Dallas, Texas