Irene Monat Stern (1932–2010) was an abstract painter whose luminous color field works are distinguished by their organic elegance and quiet power. Born in Lodz, Poland, she was a child survivor of the Holocaust, enduring persecution and repeated escapes before her family eventually emigrated to the United States by way of Paris. In New York she met the abstract sculptor Jan Peter Stern, whom she married in 1955, and studied art at the New School for Social Research, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Though she began in watercolor, Stern flourished as a painter after the couple settled in Southern California's Santa Monica Canyon in 1965. Working in Magna acrylic on unprimed canvas, she developed a signature technique in which semi-translucent, gossamer colors bloom and billow across the surface, soaking into the raw support. Her stained canvases invite comparison to Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, yet where their pigments follow gravity or deliberate gesture, Stern's colors seem weightless, massing into rich, radiant fields that are at once serene and dramatic.

Over the course of her career, Stern's paintings were shown at a range of notable venues, including the Source Gallery in San Francisco, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, the Ester Robles Gallery in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brand Library and Art Museum in Glendale, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her work also drew a wide array of collectors, from private individuals to corporations and museums such as the National Gallery, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, G.E. World Headquarters, and First National City Bank. Today, her paintings are held in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.