With their atmospheric presence, Stephanie Armbruster’s luminous paintings seek balance between figure and ground, blurring the lines between landscape and gestural abstraction. Much like their inspiration, each painting is a densely-layered accumulation of structure and symbolism. Working primarily in encaustic, Armbruster’s paintings are composed of dozens of layers of translucent wax, fused with a flame torch, and smoothed by hand. Stephanie Armbruster was born in Cleveland, OH, in 1983. She moved to Pittsburgh in 2001 to attend Carnegie Mellon University, where she received a BFA in 2006. Her work has been collected privately and publicly, and exhibited nationally at institutions including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Chautauqua Institution, Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Los Angeles Printmaking Society, James Gallery, R&F Encaustic Paints, and others.