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October 11, 2007- November 10, 2007
Reception: October 11, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Eric Aho
Reeves Contemporary
535 W 24th StEric Aho opens a show of new paintings on October 11th at Reeves Contemporary on 535 West 24th Street in New York. The exhibition runs through November 10th. The artist reception is on Thursday, October 11th, from 6-8 p.m.
Aho is an accomplished painter from southern Vermont whose work garners interest from a growing clientele of international collectors. Increasingly complex and elegant, Aho's current work demonstrates a radical departure from his previous, primarily representational, New England landscapes. The new works are compositionally intense, focusing on mass and its physicality: rock in the quarry, ice in the river, and the mass of a barn wall - the artist's most quintessential New England subjects stripped to their most essential elements.
The exhibition's central thesis is the "quarry" and Aho's compositions feature the "stubborn frontality of the rock surface, that resists as much as it invites," as Helen Vendler, noted critic, observes. "They refuse to be pliable, inviting, welcoming... they offer a wall, a cliff-face, a solid slab, a taciturn and frontal confrontation. They stop the eye; they are prophetic and severe, and they are radically beautiful in their unyieldingness."
In the exhibition catalog Peter Campion writes: "If the balance between representation and abstraction occurs in single paintings, it also happens throughout the series. In a painting like "Squared Wall", Aho makes from the shapes and the perspectives of his other quarry paintings a wholly original composition, with its audacious sheets of white and gray, sudden zigzags, and shifts of tone. Alternating between these different approaches, he is nothing if not true to felt experience, to the lived process in which fact and imagination push and pull against each other.
Eric Aho has a ranginess, even a restlessness. In all of his paintings, each shape and color fulfills its potential, and brims with energy. By dwelling in that space where the given world and the imagination interchange, he manages to capture and embody those moments when we see and feel nature for its own particularity and for its emotional force. In painting after painting, Aho frees himself and his viewers from the usual categories and concepts of contemporary art, and returns us to the experience of sheer vivacity."
Eric Aho studied at the Central School of Art and Design in London and received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. In 1989 he participated in the first exchange of scholars in over thirty years between the US and Cuba. He completed his graduate work at the Lahti Art Institute in Finland supported by a Fulbright Fellowship in 1991-92 and an American-Scandinavian Foundation grant in 1993. He has been a visiting artist at the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland; The Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland; the Weir Farm National Historic Trust in Connecticut; Colgate University in Hamilton, New York; the National College of Art in Oslo, Norway; and the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland.
He has received the Julius Hallgarten Prize in 1998 and the John Koch Award for Painting in 2000 from the National Academy Museum in New York City. Over the past several years, his work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; the Vermont Arts Council; the National Endowment for the Arts; the American Scandinavian Foundation; the Finlandia Foundation; the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland; and the Vermont Community Foundation.
Aho's paintings have been included in numerous one person and group exhibitions including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Fleming Art Museum at the University of Vermont; the Oulu City Art Museum, Oulu, Finland; the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, Massachusetts; the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; and, the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. In 2006, Aho's paintings were included in the Invitational Exhibit of Painting and Sculpture at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
This current exhibition is Aho's third at Reeves Contemporary.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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