Opening reception on Friday, October 12th from 5:00 - 7:00 pm
Erin Cone is known for her exceptionally compelling stylized portraits. She has developed a powerfully idiosyncratic visual language with strong directional lighting and reductive planes of subdued color. Her figures are stark and minimal, infused with subtle, ambiguous feeling. The paintings are full of emotion but the context is muted-- allowing the viewer to experience the work from their own perspective.
The Exhibition, Boundless, consists of a new collection of large-format acrylic paintings in which Erin Cone continues her exploration of the boundaries of realism in figurative painting. In the work, the margin between the figures’ clothing, bodies, and background become ambiguous and blurred; the highlight of a bare arm might merge seamlessly into a graphic block of color, a bodice becomes an abstract geometry, the hem of a dress dissolves like liquid into the flat white of the canvas. “I am endlessly drawn to the story the figure tells: the subtlety and complexity inherent in pose, gesture, and expression,” Erin Cone says. Through deft omission and augmentation of details, she refines the story. Cone deliberately incorporates visual glitches that throw into question the logical reality of the painting, while at the same time amplifying the painting’s emotional reality.
Born in Lubbock, Texas in 1976, Cone received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas in 1998. Since her first show in 2001, Cone has had twenty-two solo shows and participated in more than a dozen group shows across the U.S. and in Europe, consistently enjoying critical and commercial success for her unconventional approach to figurative realism. She has twice been recognized in the national art press as a top emerging artist, has been interviewed on PBS, and has been featured in numerous art magazines — appearing on the cover of American Art Collector Magazine and Southwest Art Magazine, among others. Cone's work is in hundreds of private, public and corporate collections throughout the U.S, Europe and Asia. She lives with her husband and daughter in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
