ERIC WOLF
New Work
November 19 through December 24, 1997
Jessica Fredericks Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of newwork by ERIC WOLF. Mr. Wolf last showed at this gallery in March of 1996. This will be his second one-person exhibition in New York. Earlier this year, he was among the first recipients of the new Peter S. Reed Foundation grant.
For the past few years Eric Wolf’s signature black & white landscapes have affected a compelling synthesis of the issues regarding the relationship between abstraction and representation, painting and drawing, Pop reductivism and symphonic expansiveness. In these paintings the academic (i.e. cliched) subject becomes a vehicle for a post-modern sense of the “unpresentable.” The specificity of locations or natural elements such as clouds or trees are recorded with a sameness that evokes both a singular esthetic vision and a universal interconnectedness.
For this show Mr. Wolf exhibits several plein air landscapes, painted in the summer of 1997 in the woods surrounding his Old Chatham, NY studio. Painted in pairs (two skies, two tree tops, two pine trees) the landscapes are joined by two still-life paintings of Chinese scholars’ rocks. The artist notes that the scholars’ rocks--fragments of nature recontextualized as objects of contemplation--blend the organic and the plastic with a particularly modernist sensibility. As subjects for still-life painting, the rocks refer to the natural world in which they were found, to art-objecthood to which they have been appropriated, and to Chinese landscape painting for which they served as both inspiration and model.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery by telephone at (212) 633-6555 or fax at (212) 367-9502.