Eric Blum

Eric Blum has produced a body of work that mines the indeterminate area on the periphery of the senses; in the gap between the actual and the perceived. His recent monochrome paintings feature a muted palette of green-indigo, plum brown and ice-cream pink, employing his signature ingredients: ink, silk and beeswax. Transparent, collage-like layers are developed within the guidelines of an initial drawing, which has been dictated by chance. Blum drags his designated imagery through a process of opposing inclinations: rotating, flipping, covering, uncovering, overlapping, tearing, excising and splicing. Layers beneath are unearthed. Unexpected juxtapositions appear. In some cases much of the entire painting is cut away, leaving the remaining fragments consigned to the edges of the frame and wrapping around the side of the panel. Ultimately, his original set of elements has been rearranged into a kind of visual anagram or a misunderstanding, as he calls it “no longer resembling its own preconception.”

Blum uses mixed elements like silk, ink, watercolor, and traces of beeswax to build up collage-like works from an initial drawing, which serves as a framework, setting a visual tone for each piece. Blum cuts, twists, rotates, adds, and subtracts his materials to create layering echoes of the drawing’s original forms. Blum’s work captures the way we imply familiar forms into an abstract world peripheral to our immediate sensations, filling in the spaces of fleeting, irretrievable glimpses with almost recognizable phantoms. The work, as it layers, is also an analogy for the filters of interpretation we give our experiences that create a separation between fact and perception. But Blum’s work also allows for a spontaneity of process, mirroring the spontaneity of our vision, as well as a flourish and sense of enjoyment, mirroring the joy of vision. Blum’s initial artistic inspirations were photographic. And while his work explores the unbridgeable gap between fact and perception, it also maintains a sense of photographic faithfulness to the peripheral world we almost miss and never attain.

Eric Blum (b. 1956) was born and raised in California and currently lives in New York. He has an extensive exhibition history that includes solo and group shows in New York, California, Georgia, Colorado, Spain, France, among other locations. Blum’s work has been shown at The Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, the Kresge Art Museum, the Knoxville Art Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, and the Albright-Knox Gallery. He is a two-time recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award as well as a 2008 recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts award. Blum has been represented in Denver by RULE Gallery since the 1990’s and had his first solo exhibition with the gallery in 1998.