Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present Maine Paintings, Eric Wolf’s first one-person show with the gallery.

Wolf’s painting project 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 Wolf is based in New York’s Hudson Valley. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and the City College of New York, CUNY, MFA in Painting, and also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Wolf has had residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Giverny, Blue Mountain Center, and Art Omi. His solo exhibitions include Oresman Gallery at Smith College, Northampton, MA; The Williston School, Easthampton, MA; Jeff Bailey Gallery, Fredericks-Freiser Gallery, Jessica Fredericks Gallery, all NY; and Kristina Wasserman Gallery, Providence, RI. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Art News, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, among others. Wolf’s most recent project is as curator of an exhibition at LABspace, in upstate New York, called The Nature Lab, an homage to the RISD Nature Lab and its founder, Edna Lawrence.

• Press release (PDF)
• REVIEW: Visual Art Source

This exhibition will be accompanied by a 28-page catalogue with text by David Masello.