Eric Wolf

Wolf’s painting practise has continued to evolve, as Wolf has moved from a long strict minimalist phase, into a kind of reversal: using tonal grays to create atmospheric paintings. These new works link the project to American landscape figures and traditions like Marsden Hartley, Charles Burchfield and the Hudson River school, as well as the perceptual suggestiveness of the impressionists and early modernists.

The work inverts the tradition of moving from representation to abstraction while retaining modernism’s core value of oscillating and dynamic representations of visual space. Integrating these divergent interests into a coherent project, the work is teeming with references across disparate cultural practices, while delivering unusual visual richness and spatial ambiguity.

Wolf’s embrace of experiential nature-as-subject continues to play with formalism’s constraints, and representation’s limits. Inspired by the scale and purity of the subject as it exists in Maine’s Wilderness, Wolf creates paintings whose deep cross-cultural origins reflect on the history of modern representation, from calligraphic writing to minimalism’s deep, blank surfaces.

Eric lives and works in Chatham, NY