spheris gallery | 59 South Main St | Hanover, NH | 603.640.6155

For Immediate Release
9-24-08
Contact: Azariah Aker
603 640 6155
info@spherisgallery.com

Eric Aho Exhibits New Paintings at Spheris Gallery

Hanover, New Hampshire… Eric Aho opens an exhibition at Spheris Gallery, on Saturday evening, October11th.  The reception is open to the public from 6:00-8:00, and the artist will be in attendance.  The exhibition runs from October 11th to November 19th, 2008.

It is easy to admire Eric Aho's renderings of New England views, countrysides, white houses, or ever-fluctuating weather. With deftly controlled movements of thickly applied color, Aho’s paintings are always balanced on the edge between abstraction and representation.

Aho’s most recent work addresses the vagaries of memory. Continental Divide (2008) shows the natural world with a dynamic intensity: recognizable signifiers of a Colorado landscape – clouds, sky, trees – peek out of the edges of the painting to support the maelstrom of color in the center.  The effect achieves rare depth, so that the large canvas offers a range of shifting perspectives as one views the painting from varying distances.

There is a similar energy in Nightfall (2008). For this scene of woodland ruin, the artist includes in his palette startling hues – jets of red punctuate the lower left quadrant, giving an added drama to the dark composition. Ice House No. 6 (2007) displays another expression of Aho’s capabilities with light, as a white building stands blindingly distinct and yet wholly part of its wooded surroundings.

Aho’s paintings conjure the natural world with a unique imagination, so that his works are not mere landscapes but studies in the sublime.  “I think of that house not as a house, but as something else - an iceberg - the contradiction frees me up.  I like to imagine those clouds as being made of lead. How heavy they seem...,” Aho says.  With strokes of decided strength, Aho gives viewers palpable access to his particular transformation of the observed world.

Aho's paintings have been included in numerous one person and group exhibitions including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Fleming Art Museum at the University of Vermont; the Oulu City Art Museum, Oulu, Finland; the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, Massachusetts; the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; the Philadelphia Art Alliance; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has recently added one of Aho’s new river paintings to its permanent collection.