An artist who worked in the post-cubist and constructivist traditions, Stephen P. Edlich gained a considerable amount of acclaim in the 1970s and 1980s for his collages, sculpture, and paintings. His promising career was cut short due to his untimely death at age 45 in 1989.
Edlich was born in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree with a major in fine arts studies from New York University in 1967. During his college years, he traveled to London, where he met the art dealer Victor Waddington and created his first white on white collage. In that same year, he attended a major exhibition of the work of Ben Nicholson, which would be influential source in his art. Edlich returned to England in 1967, where he met Barbara Hepworth and Patrick Heron in London and traveled to St. Ives, Cornwall, long a favorite artists' haunt. Edlich began creating acrylic reliefs in 1967. In the following year, he began a master of arts program in sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York, but continued his art career, completing a series of bronze reliefs at Columbian Art Metal Works, New Jersey.
Edlich had first solo exhibition in 1969, consisting of a group of sculptures shown at Waddington Galleries in Montreal. In 1970, an exhibition of Edlich's sculptures was held at Albert Landry Galleries in New York. From 1970 to 1972, Edlich worked as an apprentice for a serigraphic printing firm. He served as adjunct instructor in the Fine Arts Department of the New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, New York, in 1974-75. In 1975, he was invited to participate in an exhibition at Gruenebaum Gallery entitled Constructivism is Alive , which brought attention to his art. This was followed by Stephen Edlich: The Chord Suite—Recent Work , a solo show of Edlich's paintings at the gallery that received a commendatory review in the New York Times from John Russell, who called the art on view "just about as good as it could be." Russell noted echoes in Edlich's work from the art of the recent past, such as that of Mondrian and Nicholson, while recognizing Edlich's exploration in his art of a painting as a constructed object, as seen in Edlich's use of "different kinds of sacking and a length of jute rope."
In 1977, Edlich moved to Marlborough Gallery, where he had exhibitions in 1978, 1981, 1983, and 1985. His work belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, Oklahoma; the Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor.