Many people get confused between a gallery wrap and a stretched canvas. Gallery-wrap is a modern style of displaying art over thick wooden bars. It is a stretched canvas that doesn't have any visible staples or nails holding the canvas to the wooden stretcher bars so the painting could be hung unframed.

Stretched canvas is something completely different. In order to have your painting framed it first has to be stretched across stretcher bars. A stretched canvas differs from a gallery wrap. First, the stretcher bars are thinner allowing the staples to show on the sides of the wood. Therefore, unlike the gallery wrap, a stretched canvas is not a finished look but gallery wrap is ready to hang on the wall.