Eric Aho: Headwater Gallery Guide

Open Pond in the Forest, 2021, oil on linen, 78 x 70"

GA LLERY GU IDE

FEBRUARY 1 8 —J U NE 5, 2022

INTRODUCTION Eric Aho debuts a new series of monumental and intimately scaled paintings that feature captivating scenes of the natural world. Inspired by the artist’s explorations and wanderings amidst the lush, forest landscape surrounding his home in Saxtons River, Vermont, Aho’s canvases convey a sense of vastness and intimacy with the land.

Using color, scale, gesture, and rhythm, Aho’s depictions of nature are an exchange of contrasts between abstraction and representation, experience and memory. Embracing romantic and modern traditions, the artist’s images of rivers, waterfalls, streams, and brooks coursing through deep forest interiors reflect our relationship with the wilderness – as being a part of nature, yet also an intruder. In Headwater, Eric Aho’s immersive canvases invite us to consider what painting from life and representing the natural world means today.

— Heather Ferrell, Curator and Director of Exhibitions

Echo Pond’s Edge, Wild Spring, 2021, oil on linen, 78 x 70"

Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud, sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue, when I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm that witnessing presence.

—Witness, Denise Levertov

ARTIST STATEMENT To stand still in the woods even for a few moments is hard to do. It’s challenging to slow down and look—to just look.

I’m lucky that my work takes me deep into the woods, and it’s still hard to step away from the demands of the outside world. It’s hard to put the phone down. Now, more than ever, there’s a moral imperative to look closely at nature. Painting the landscape is, among other wonderful and mysterious things, charged to measure the cadence of time and seasonal cycles in an accumulated material record of perceived nuance. Close looking might, it turns out, just be a valuable and necessary witness.

My Saxtons River, Vermont studio is in the gymnasium of a former girl’s orphanage at the edge of the woods on the far side of the village, just a short walk from our home. The surrounding terrain—hills, fields, rivers, streams, and the forest—are my starting points for these paintings and the

simple pleasure of being outdoors. The landscape is a hanger of sorts on which to drape new observations and curiosities. In it are infinite arrangements and possibilities for painting, and clues to the enduring modern puzzle of figuration and abstraction.

Witness, 2021, oil on linen, 70 x 78"

These new works are vestiges of actual places,

each unearthed, reshaped, and reconstructed in the studio compelled by memory and invention. They’re immensities made intimate; painting them is an attempt to wrangle time and reality. My sense of both shifted these past two years.

Of course, in painting, “realness” and “reality” are separate matters. Though related, the actual and the imagined fuse unexpectedly in the material binding me to nature and to the canvas. Oil paint, made from earthen elements suspended in a fatty oil akin to our own, is a kind of temperamental figurative glue.

— Eric Aho

CHECKLIST Spirit Stand, 2021 oil on linen 78 x 70"

Americana, 2021 oil on linen 52 x 48"

Echo Pond’s Edge, Wild Spring, 2021 oil on linen 70 x 78"

Falls and a Pool in the Forest, 2021 oil on linen 52 x 48"

Open Pond in the Forest, 2021 oil on linen 78 x 70" Talus Pool, 2020 oil on linen 78 x 70" Witness, 2021 oil on linen 78 x 70" July Pond, 2021 oil on linen 60 x 52"

Pond Edge, Cold Spring, 2021 oil on linen 48 x 52" Rapids and Fallen Trees Below the Cascade, 2020 oil on linen 24 x 22" Orion, Mists, and Fireflies (no. 2), 2021 oil on linen 22 x 24" Brook, 2020 oil on linen 20 x 16"

Open Winter Stream (Valentine), 2021 oil on linen 60 x 52"

Falls, 2021 oil on linen 20 x 16"

Tamarack, 2021 oil on linen 60 x 52"

Small Winter Stream, 2021 oil on linen 20 x 16"

All works Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York Photos: Rachel Portesi

ERIC AHO lives and works in Saxtons River, VT. After studying at the Central School of Art and Design in London, the artist received his BFA, and in 1989 participated in the first exchange of scholars between the U.S. and Cuba in over thirty years.

Recent solo exhibitions include Eric Aho, New Britain Museum of American Art, CT (2016); Eric Aho: Ice Cuts Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH (2016); Eric Aho: In the Landscape, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC (2013); and Transcending Nature: Paintings by Eric Aho, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH (2012). The artist’s work has also been featured in numerous international group exhibitions, such as: New at the Neuberger, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY (2019); Aperture, Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX (2017); and Changing Soil: Contemporary Landscape Painting, Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Japan (2010). Aho’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, among others.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

FAMILY ART SATURDAY

Saturdays, February 26, March 26, and April 23, 11am – 1pm BCA Center, Fourth Floor Get creative and make art together! Families can drop-in at the BCA Center in-person and enjoy an art activity inspired by Eric Aho’s landscape paintings.

VIRTUAL ARTIST TALK WITH ERIC AHO Wednesday, April 6, 2022, 6pm

BCA presents an interactive, online program with Eric Aho in conjunction with his BCA exhibition, Headwater. Aho discusses his approach to painting – an evocative blend of abstraction and realism – and reveals the visual and literary sources that inform his work.

Eric Aho: Headwater is sponsored in part by

THE MASLOW FAMILY FOUNDATION

Hospitality sponsor, Lake Champlain Chocolates. Burlington City Arts is supported in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts through the New England Arts Resilience Fund, part of the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund, an initiative of the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with major funding from the federal CARES Act from the National Endowment for The Arts, and by the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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