Eric Blum

b. 1956, Fresno, California
Lives and works in New York City, NY

Eric Blum (b. 1956) was born and raised in California and now lives and works in New York. He has been represented by RULE Gallery in Denver since the 1990s, debuting with a solo exhibition in 1998. Blum’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally, with notable shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Santa Fe, Denver, Madrid, and Paris. His work has been showcased at institutions such as The Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, the Kresge Art Museum, the Knoxville Art Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Work by Blum is held in numerous corporate and private collections around the world. Blum has twice received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 1998 and 2001. Blum has also been honored as a recipient of the 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts award.

Throughout his career, 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 “misunderstanding,” as he calls it…no longer resembling its own preconception.