Marina Stern was a multifaceted New York-based artist. Originally from Venice, Stern and her family fled in 1939 to escape antisemitism in Italy at this time. After living in England for several years, the family arrived in the United States in 1941. Stern initially garnered attention in the avant-garde art world in 1964 when Time reviewed a show at Amel Gallery, which featured three of her audio-visual paintings. The critic noted that Stern created the “cleverest noisemakers” in the show. Eventually, Stern turned to a kind of Neo Immaculate painting that blended elements of Precisionism, Pop Art, and Surrealism.

Rooftop is an example of Marina Stern’s unique form of “Synthetic Realism,” as articulated by art historian Stephen Foster in the artist’s 2007 retrospective catalogue. Although informed by Precisionist painters from the 1920s and 1930s—such as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth—and the earlier generation’s exploration of the American industrial and urban landscape, Stern’s painting reaches into more cinematic angles and cropping. Unlike contemporaries working in photorealism, such as Richard Estes or Janet Fish, Stern’s editing of reality is more severe, resulting in a carefully mediated, minimal vocabulary.

Stern’s work was included in solo exhibitions in Boston at Eleanor Rigelhaupt Gallery, Hartford at Silo Gallery as well as venues in Chicago and Santa Fe. Her work was included in group shows at a number of museums, including The Staten Island Museum, New York; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; and the National Academy of Design, New York. Stern is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC in addition to other institutions. In 2007, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art hosted a retrospective of four decades of Stern’s work titled Perception and the Cultural Environment: The Paintings of Marina Stern.