Gareth Stehr paints with the language of the street. Oil, acrylic and aerosol collide across his canvases, pulling cowboy and Marlboro iconography, text and pop imagery into bold, charged compositions. There is swagger and grit in the work, and underneath it a set of questions about masculinity, chance and endurance. Four unique paintings are currently available at Art of NOMA, from USD 3,575 to USD 4,400.
Cowboy and Marlboro Imagery, Stripped of Myth
The cowboy is the most overworked figure in American visual culture, which is precisely why Stehr keeps returning to it. He treats the frontier and cigarette-advertising vocabulary as found material — subject matter appropriated for painting, not affiliation or endorsement of any kind — and then puts it under pressure. What survives is the posture rather than the sales pitch: the squint, the distance, the idea that a man is supposed to absorb whatever arrives without comment.
That move has a long lineage in painting. Appropriating advertising imagery and then draining it of its persuasive function is one of the durable strategies of post-Pop practice, and it has had a visible resurgence over the last decade as a generation of painters reaches back into the commercial image bank of the twentieth century. What separates Stehr's version is that he does not treat the source with irony. The cowboy is not a punchline in these paintings; it is a costume somebody is still wearing, and the work is interested in what wearing it costs.
Text and pop imagery run alongside it. Titles like 500 Miles Of Good Luck (126 × 86 cm / 49.6 × 33.9 in, USD 4,125) measure distance in persistence as much as mileage, which is a fair description of how the paintings themselves are built. Language in Stehr's work behaves less like a caption than like graffiti — a phrase left on a surface by someone who has already moved on.
How Do Acrylic and Aerosol Work Together?
Badly, if you want them to agree — and that friction is the point. Across the available originals, acrylic lays down weight, structure and depth while aerosol brings velocity and abrasion. One medium settles, the other skids. Layers overlap and refuse to resolve politely, so the surface reads as accumulated effort rather than a single decision.
The technical difference matters more than it sounds. Brushed acrylic is a contact medium: the mark records the pressure of a hand and can be reworked, scraped and built up over days. Aerosol is a distance medium, sprayed from several inches away, laying down a soft-edged veil that cannot be pushed around once it lands. Putting them in the same painting means committing to two incompatible speeds — the deliberate and the irreversible — and leaving the evidence of both visible. Nothing in these surfaces is smoothed over after the fact.
At The Altar Of The Sun (96 × 66 cm / 37.8 × 26.0 in, USD 3,575) is the clearest demonstration at close range. The vertical format pushes the energy upward, and control and eruption hold each other in check without either winning. Each original is mounted on a handmade wooden art panel and frame and arrives with a certificate of authenticity.
Triumph, Disaster and the Question of Endurance
Two paintings from 2025 work as a pair. Triumph (120 × 80 cm / 47.2 × 31.5 in, USD 4,400) reads victory less as a single moment than as accumulated effort and resistance — what endurance actually costs. Disaster (120 × 80 cm / 47.2 × 31.5 in, USD 4,000) takes rupture as a force rather than a scene, collapse understood as both event and process.
Hung together they make the argument that neither outcome is really the subject. What Stehr is painting is the interval in which you do not yet know which one you are in. That is also, incidentally, why the two work as a purchase: identical dimensions, opposed titles, and a shared surface logic. A collector who takes both is buying a proposition rather than two decorations, and pairs of that kind tend to hold their coherence far longer than works assembled one at a time.
Where Stehr Sits Among the Artists at Art of NOMA
Stehr is not the only painter in the roster working with American iconography, and the comparisons are useful if you are deciding where to start. Jade Tantillo handles overlapping territory — Western imagery, the mythology of the rider — from an entirely different temperature. Midnight Rider and Leather & EastWood approach the same figures with tenderness where Stehr applies abrasion. Hung in the same room they read as an argument rather than a repetition.
Daniel Stara offers the opposite kind of contrast: oil painting built with patience and an unbroken surface, in works such as Age of Surveillance and For My Next Trick. Where Stehr's paintings show every layer of their own making, Stara's conceal the process entirely. Collectors who respond to one often respond to the other precisely because of that gap — a collection benefits from disagreement more than from consistency.
What Should a First Stehr Purchase Be?
The four available originals are close enough in price that the decision is about format rather than budget. If you want the horizontal statement, take Triumph or Disaster. If the wall is tall and narrow, 500 Miles Of Good Luck or At The Altar Of The Sun will do more work in the space. Every one of them is unique, and once sold the specific painting does not reappear.
Scarcity of that kind changes how the decision feels. With editioned work there is always a version of "I can find it later"; with a one-of-one there is not. First-time buyers routinely underestimate this and lose a painting they had been circling for weeks. The practical answer is to decide what you are responding to — the surface, the format, the title — and then move, rather than waiting for a certainty that never arrives.
Prices are published on every work at Art of NOMA — no "price on request," no need to write an email before you know whether something is in reach. We are an online gallery with no physical space, which means no appointment, no room to walk into, and no one standing behind you while you decide.
A Brief Note on the Limited Edition Prints
Alongside the originals there are two signed and numbered giclée editions, Bros In Arms I and Have A Nice Brain (both 55 × 80 cm / 21.7 × 31.5 in, editions of 25, USD 300 each). They are printed on William Turner Hahnemühle 190 gsm matte paper and ship rolled in a tube. They are worth knowing about, but the originals are where the work lives. A print is a reasonable way to live with the imagery; it is not a way to own the surface, and with this particular artist the surface is most of the argument.
Browse every available work in the Gareth Stehr collection, explore more original paintings, or meet the full roster on our artists page. If you want to talk through a specific painting before deciding — scale, framing, shipping, or how two works read side by side — get in touch from any work page and we will answer directly.