Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York. Photography by Rachel Portesi.
Eric Aho, Open Pond in the Forest
Statement
It seems ice, snow, and cold–in all its forms–can only be understood during winter. The extremes of contrast insist on a strange naturalism mixed with something quite the opposite of real. Not to go all Dr. Zhivago on you here, but nothing in my experience of the natural world compares to standing alone in the silence of a winter forest. A favorite spot, inaccessible during the warmer months and now frozen over, is reachable on skis. It’s quiet there, but before it’s silent, it’s loud. Turns out I’m the disturbance in my own private moment and it takes time to settle and listen between your breath and your pulse. A few weeks ago, winter let go of its grip momentarily and the pond deep in the forest blinked–a reminder of the fragile outer world as tenuous in our minds as it is in actuality.
| Artwork Info | |
|---|---|
| Date | 2021 |
| Dimensions | 78 x 70 inches |
| Medium | Oil on linen |
| Artist Info | |
|---|---|
| Born | Melrose, MA |
| Works | Saxtons River, VT |
Reflecting on this Year
It got more personal–the landscape and its blurry place between the public and the private; access and exclusion; the real and the invented.
Biography
Eric Aho was born in Melrose, Massachusetts in 1966 and grew up in rural New Hampshire. He studied printmaking at London’s Central School of Art and Design, and received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Aho completed his graduate work at the Lahti Art Institute in Finland supported by a Fulbright Fellowship in 1991–92 and an American-Scandinavian Foundation grant in 1993. Exhibited and collected widely, his works are included in the permanent collections of the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase; and New Britain Museum of American Art, CT, among others. Aho lives and works in Saxtons River, Vermont. DC Moore Gallery in New York represents his work.
